On "Experimental" Poetry

Everybody likes to beat up on the strawman/woman of confessional "narrative" poetry. Everybody has read language poetry and now the narrative poetry of the 1970s is no longer "smart." We agree that such poetry is ludicrous. However, we have noted with interest that most of these people who have read language poetry, Jorie Graham and Ashbery, and who admire each others' poems for being "smart" have just exchanged cosmetics. They are writing the same little pious poems that the confessional poets wrote. Only instead of writing poems that are "real" (grampa, child abuse, nature) they write poems that are "smart" (signifier, ellipsis, problematize). The concept of psychology is the same. What does "experimental" mean these days? Oddly it has come to mean the same as "alternative music" meant in the 1990s. It means nostalgic. The same thing "real" meant in the 70s and 80s. (Somwhere in this rat beats Eliot's hyacinth girl). Experimental poetry buries its head and plays a funeral dirge on a violin because it reminds it of the movies it used to watch when it had a head. We laugh at this phenomenon. Poetry is hilarious. Montgomery Cliff is not the same person as Montgomery Clift. Are manifestoes nostalgic? Are you nostalgic? Are you my Acapulco? We are patently nostalgic. We prefer to read Anatol Stern. What happened?