While I love the idea of "camp," I don't believe in "camps." So many people confuse aesthetic choices with ideologies. I can't imagine anything being "off limits" for an entire group of individuals bound together by common beliefs. It's a kind of intellectual segregation. Good art is good art, regardless of how you yourself write your own poems. We should be celebrating aesthetic diversity instead of using aesthetic principles to beat up on one another. I shake my head sometimes at poets. We are a plural lot. And yet, sometimes, some of us get entrenched as if there's a war on. Yes, there is a war on. But it's not poet versus poet. It's poetry versus other kinds of cultural stupidity. And yes, I meant it to sound that way.
- D.A. Powell, in interview with James Cihlar in the May/June 2011 issue of American Poetry Review. Thanks to Bren Simmers for pointing this out.
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