The last gasps of the American revolutionary spirit were choked out in the Civil War, when the most conservative form of liberal government ever invented unhinged its jaws and swallowed its antithetical self, the South, whole, only to have to regurgitate some of its bones, of course, every twenty years or so since 1865. The lesson is that no revolution, no matter how revolting, can avoid the voracious maw of a stable Democratic republic that will assimilate, digest and even grow fat on anything.

The political is the poetical. America is so huge that any revolution will find its audience here and none can possibly disturb it. Our pilgrim Protestantism is our special handicap: American poets believe in a personal poetics the way Luther believed in a personal God; alas, we usually skip any dreary reading of the scriptures on our way to revelation. (American poets start reading poetry only after they have started writing “poems.”) American poets don’t even really like poetry (cf. Marianne Moore); it’s a subject to avoid, like politics or religion.

We cannot agree on what makes poems good. We cannot agree on what defines the craft. We may praise our diversity publicly, but when we do so we deny our divisiveness.

We bond, when we do, through our dislikes, and we will not be led, or defined, by anything but our personal constituencies. “Don’t Tread On Me” and “Live Free or Die!” were the slogans on American revolutionaryera snake flags; those snakes were severed.

The unity in American poetry can be heard in our relatively democratic, demotic voices. Yet even a plain-speaking American poet is apt to dislike two or more of the following “schools” for one or more reasons: beat poetry (too loose structure, antiestablishment rhetoric, often bisexual or homosexual as if that were interesting); formalist poetry (uptight structure for its own sake, dead white pseudo-establishment rhetoric, often homosexual); L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry (nonce or non-traditional structure, arhetorical—the last thing it wants to do is convince anyone of anything, asexual); slam poetry (dramatic structure, antiestablishment rhetoric enhanced by screaming, pan-sexual); world poetry (sounds like translation, employs traditional European rhetorics, often bior homosexual as if that didn’t matter); and the poetry of personal growth (loose structure, earnest anti-establishment rhetoric, pan-sexual—all in fear of casting judgment). Some poets do cross over: in the Haight-Ashbury for instance, it used to be cool to hate Ashbery; no more.

Gil Scott-Heron didn’t know how right he was when he forecast that “the revolution will not be televised.” He didn’t know he was pointing to the impossibility of revolution in a country where everything is televisual. (Seeing Los Angeles, CA burn puts out fires in Atlanta; Mark Strand on the Internet encourages a beatnik in Seattle.) American poetry of the future will certainly be polyglot (the dominance of English will recede), published in cyberspace (less and less print) and defined by performances (preserved on CD and DVD) instead of text. Everything will be possible and nothing will matter to us all.