Initial Receptions: P.F.S. Post, Waxing Hot

As of now, I'd like to think that P.F.S. Post has settled in as a stalwart presence in both American and continental experimental poetics. It has been archived by the British Library, and widely quoted. Strange, and cautionary, to remember that when P.F.S. Post appeared in 2005, it was greeted with enormous hostility. It may seem senseless now, but Philadelphia, as a hotbed of experimental work being done, took the measure of P.F.S. Post as too classicist and elitist (or "frozen") to be taken seriously; and a laser-sharp focus on London was OK for John Tranter and Jacket, but not for me. The APR/Poetry crowd took umbrage for much the same reasons. A case in point is this early Waxing Hot dialogue with Steve Halle from spring 2006. The English Romantics are not only taken seriously as active, dynamic reference points, they are placed at the head of the class, over the High Mods and those who followed them. That all the hostility seems senseless now points out and adumbrates something else even more important: the evolution of the United States from a Barnum & Bailey, circus-level cultural cul de sac into a mature nation. It is obvious, in 2023 in America, that celebrity culture (mentioned in Waxing Hot as fodder for post-modernism) doesn't sell that much anymore; nor does a centralized, uber-warping press corps. A more advanced United States means that more people keep their own consul and go their own way, express whatever divergent interests they have, against having their cultural economies dictated to them by destructive cultural juggernauts. But in the mid-Aughts, media interests, circus interests, still held sway, and that P.F.S. Post lionized Keats in a serious minded way, next to more usual Amer-Po fodder,  was anathematized. A taste of things to come: this Waxing Hot was re-published in UK print journal Tears in the Fence (#47) in 2008. As per our treatment of Keats: also, knowing it's not really fair to do this if Steve doesn't get to chime in again: twenty years on, indeterminacy/closure doesn't seem as important to me about Keats and as Keats-narrative, as form and formality. The big thing with Keats for me turned out to be the music. Melopoeia. Negative capability can't matter that much if the mysteries being unfolded/embodied have no philosophical heft. Peace.