Ahmurika w/P&K

So, Pinsky & Komunyakaa vs. Forche, Knox, Strand, Rich. This would make for an odd cage match. What would the rules be even? Pinsky and Know go well together; they could make a match at the Poetry Prom perhaps; she the merrymaker, he the earnest incantationist. Komunyakaa goes with Rich and Forche (all platonic of course, though after alcohol who knows). Strand: stag! (I apologize for all this)...Moving on, the easiest way for me to differentiate between P&K is to look at the basics. K seems more stable in terms of unity of theme; when he begins, I can for the most part follow (the structure is often narrative, or if not, follows a line of melody, the parts of which appear somewhat related). When K moves he moves largely within the mind of the speaker (there are times when this is not so and K resembles P); when P moves he moves as if a camera flying over a landscape, inhabiting the particulars of an entire country. The movement, as in City Elegies, covers an enormous amount of space, where the details evoke the larger scene, which we cut from into a different scene, and then another, etc. Here there's little of Altieri's self-satisfaction (which we find in Komunyakaa now and again), little of the end silence. The poems simply stop, perhaps because they could go on.

Part of what distinguishes both of these poets for me, and connects them in some ways to Rich, are the ways in which they're depicting poetry as a "thing" in a culture; the context or scope of which seems almost always to have a culture in mind, a situation that unfolds beyond the private, a thing that intrudes upon the private and that the private intrudes upon. People are in places; the world is about, everywhere. Unlike Strand, whose poems seem at times to let us in only to a cloister in which Strand's emotional life battles the self-same demons, P&K's realm is far more public, and inhabits any number of stances in order to articulate stories about themselves telling stories (though all is not story here) about others, though K is often using himself to tell the story of the world in relation to him. History here is used for scope, to delineate ourselves in/from the past, whether K's vietnam or jazz or Pinsky's jesus or window.