A particularly interesting passage from Shivani's review:
The major problem with regard to politics and poetry, it seems to me, is that contemporary American poets have generally decided to be apolitical. Sometimes they go out of their way to inject politics into their poetics--as on the occasions of Bush's wars or Obama's election or the Hurricane Katrina disaster--but they quickly retreat, are uncomfortable with the posture, and as a lot believe that poetry should have no business engaging with politics. A political worldview tends to saturate poetry from other regions of the world, even when the poetry is not explicitly political. There are explicit institutional reasons why poetry with a political attitude is verboten.
At the same time, poetry with a political charge has never ceased being written in America, despite the onslaught of confessionalism. I'm just reading Tony Trigilio's Historic Diary and the young poet Harmony Holiday's Negro League Baseball, and have been rereading Amiri Baraka's early poetry, as politically resonant as anything one can read today. It remains true, however, that American poetry--like American literature in general--is shy of class and economics, and this is the biggest question to be addressed with respect to politics and poetry.
Here's one more (and likely controversial) section of the review, relating to the now-and-forever practice of poetry incest:
Some years ago the website Foetry.com exposed the obvious corruption in small and university press poetry book publication (almost all first books are published through contests), where well-known poets like Jorie Graham judged in favor of their friends or students. This, actually, is only the tip of the iceberg, not the most remarkable form of corruption. Foetry wasn't a momentary jolt to the impartial standards of academic poetry, but its very essence. However, this is how Orr justifies the corruption:
In such arrangements, the idea of fair play doesn't typically extend to people outside the group. Nor is that attitude necessarily to be criticized: If you and your friends are struggling to get attention, it hardly makes sense to spend each brief moment in the spotlight talking about the gang down the street.
In other words, it's okay to exclude outsiders when you're supposed to be impartial judges! In fact, Orr takes the example of Foetry admonishing corrupt poetry judging as an example of the system working--somebody bothered to take the trouble to expose the corruption, which goes to show that university poets are expected to uphold standards. Only a lawyer would engage in this sort of reasoning.
