Jeffrey C. Robinson: from “Romantic Manifestos Manifest” (a work in progress).

 

  As an indication of how relentless and intelligent Jeffrey Robinson has been in bringing works of core and marginal Romanticism into their comparisons with later experimental and innovative poetry coming into our own time and place, today’s Poems and Poetics offers a further opening and exploration.  For myself, Robinson has been a key figure in reading these comparisons for what they were, and I had the great honor and pleasure of working with him in the construction of the Romanticism volume of Poems for the Millennium – a crucial resource, I hope, for what he and Julie Carr have so beautifully titled “active romanticism.”  The presentation shown here, and still a work in progress, will finally “gather together 75 or so statements, terms, and jargon from the ‘Romantic mother-lode’ (Anne Waldman) with the hope,” he writes, “that together, and with accompanying commentary, they will accumulate irrefutably a major well-spring for modern and contemporary innovative poetry.”  To get a sense of Robinson in action, you can check it out, as always, at poemsandpoetics.blogpot.com or at the Jacket2 site: https://jacket2.org/commentary/jeffrey-c-robinson-1