Fieled As Ideal Reader

Adam Fieled, the American poet-critic, has blogged on my early 21st century collection Cafe Alibi. He may be - so far - the ideal reader for the work: he both claims for that collection a post-avant status, and recognises its Nabokovian intentions. I was much influenced by my mentor Robert Allen, who was a big fan of Nabokov, and turned me on to his work. Bataille was also, in terms of the transgressive, an important thinker in this regard. Sontag's essay on the pornographic imagination, which I hadn't read when I wrote the book, now seems to me to be a touchstone I'd return to. Interestingly - for me - several of the darker poems Fieled selects as the best I left out of my new and selected - perhaps recoiling, myself, from their edge. I wonder what Fieled would make of poets like Seidel?