There are many things to be said at this point. So grab a cigarette (does anyone read poetry and not smoke?), a cup of coffee and let’s chat a bit.

I have to tell you something about where I’m at. And it’s hard to articulate. I haven’t published much in the last eight months. I have sixty poems in the mail right now at twelve different magazines. And that’s just the stuff I bothered to type up. I’m half way through my third unpublished book, not chapbook books but a hundred and city page manuscripts, for or sixty long poems. God knows how many chapbooks. The “feminist” (women/rage — woman/angry…. how dare she) is very hard to publish. The very person poems are very hard to publish. The brand new, ten-page long poems I’m doing now are impossible to publish.

First of all, it seems that the poems currently being published by “name” small magazines are interchangeable. Halpern’s anthology (The American Poetry Anthology) reads like one long poem. The currently acceptable style (the Iowa and New York style) can be loosely characterized as: safe and middle of the road. The poems are generally short, one page. By safe, I mean that the poet is dealing with subject matter he/she already understands. The poet is merely restating what he already knows about the world. With this fundamental aspect in mind, the only problem is how to freshly restate what he already knows. This leads to academic poetry, poetry of strain, poetry that is called “experimental” but is actually mechanistic, artificial and soulless, anything but what experimental should really mean. The acceptable poem is flawless. It is a poem of technique and it makes no mistakes. The problem with the currently acceptable poem as I see it is that in addition to not making any mistakes, it doesn’t take any chances, it doesn’t take any risks, it isn’t ambitious. Poetry must (my fundamental assumption) deal with what the poet does not yet know. It must be a work of exploration. The poetry of exploration, by confronting what the poet doesn’t know, by taking the enormous risks of shining a flashlight into the pitch black has the advantage of stumbling on the brilliant connections that make us human. (On other words, art). I see that as Plath’s greatest strength, that she stumbled on connections. That’s what gives her work (to me, and I’m only talking about Ariel) such fantastic energy. Connection spark/sizzle/energy.

Now, I don’t know how much you are or are not seeing where I’m at so far. I've basically disconnected myself from the mainstream of current poetry buy operating on a fundamentally different set of principles. I’ve written my poems of careful restatement. I call them exercises. O.K. Once severed from the the Iowa/New work mainstream, there is the problem of L.A.

L.A. poetry poetry (if anyone thinks about it at all) is noted or called the Bukowski school. If you’ve read Buskowski and his disciples, certain generalizations can be made. The L.A. school deals with the superficial. The eye sees what is obviously there — the billboards, neon, freeway nightmare. Bukowski has managed to confuse the painful problems of human self-awareness with the painful problems associated with a hangover. The substance of his art is material generally reserved for aspiring commercials That’s the L.A. school.

(At this point, violins will please strike up a chorus of ONE AGAINST THE WORLD……)

There is a sub school of L.A. poetry. L.A. has always existed in artistic isolation. There are a handful of people I know who have responded to this isolation by experimenting, by exploring, by dealing with a very emotional internal reality, an examination of their humanity….. art.

Basically we have commitment and energy, but can’t define/articulate what we are doing in an academic, win a critical sense. We are too close to it? Too involved? It’s been six years since I set foot in a university, and the critical tools I once had have eroded. I don’t believe that we can be a movement until we define our uniqueness.

It’s taken me four years to come up with the ideas in this letter and two and a half hours to write this letter. I hope I have said something of interest.

-- Kate Braverman, August 27, 1976.