this is a good exchange, and I could add huffy Henry's scattershot to the brew of opinion, and that midwest Hessian from the other side. I found I kinda hate listserv exchanges because there's such a definition involved. sides taken. aesthetic choice is not truth in the sense of a wide ranging answer. I don't know by what means one can circle Keats and Stein together as poets, or Dickinson and Olson, or name your dyad, but one can, I know I have. and that's interesting and affirming. I have to remind myself that X isn't BAD poetry but that to which I cannot connect (not to deny that crap exists). I came to poetry as a real foreigner, so that Keats and Olson were equally and simultaneously strange and new to me, as I made my study of poetry. I like to hear from 'the other side', for that might be, after all, my side.