Mostly Clearing

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. At times ironic and sincere, optimism colors every interaction, transaction, and action absorbed into the mockingbird diction of MOSTLY CLEARING. This repetitive impulse privileges idiom and anachronism as means of indexing specific generational affects. Throughout, Gottlieb's speaker addresses three generations of poets: the New York School, his own milieu of Language Writers, and the younger generation whose artistic practice is situated by precarity, instability, and disillusionment. The speaker sympathizes with the latter, nostalgic for "all the swooning certainty of youth/ . . . here once it sprouted in all directions." In the end, hope is what the speaker bequeaths to younger poets as the raw material for imagining a new utopian art.