At the risk of being reductive, there are two categories of contemporary poets: those who receive laurels, tenure, grants, fellowships and publication in perfect bound journals and those who publish on websites and tiny, obscure presses and promote their books primarily through Facebook, Twitter and blogs. The longstanding divide between academically sanctioned poetry and avant garde writing has been exacerbated in part due to two factors: the proliferation of creative writing MFA programs and the growth of internet publishing. These collections from Gabrielle Calvocoressi and Brandon Scott Gorrell are each in their own way an example of these two countervailing trends.

According to Edward Delaney’s 2007 article “Where Great Writers Are Made” in The Atlantic Monthly, the number of creative writing programs in America has exploded from 50 to more than 300 in the last three decades. This means that each year thousands more poets graduate with the expectation that, like their professors, they too will be able to make a living -- if not by writing poetry -- at least by teaching it. And yet the proportion of MFA holders who manage to find this type of full-time academic employment remains miniscule.

Meanwhile, digital publishing, print on demand, and social networking sites make it faster, cheaper and easier than ever to get one’s work published DIY. In contrast to the academic model, avant-garde poetry is part of a tradition that has always favored cheap-o publishing methods -- such as the Xerox machine and its precursor, the mimeograph -- and this branch of American poetry has largely embraced the possibilities of digital publishing. And so, to some extent, the number of participants in both of these two branches of poetry is more numerous than ever regardless of whatever readership contemporary poetry is able to muster.

In 2005, Booklist declared Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s first book, The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart to be a “tour de force collection” from “a potent new poetic talent.” Calvocoressi’s bio is the stuff MFA students dream of: the sought-after Stegner fellowship, a position as a lecturer at Stanford, a bunch of awards and teaching in creative writing programs. Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s writing is an example of a type of – for lack of a better word -- popular poetry, primarily an extension of academic poetry. At the annual Associated Writing Programs (AWP) conference, conference attendees line up to have books signed by mainstream poets and tenured professors like Billy Collins or Mary Oliver, which is what passes for mainstream success in poetry’s Liliputian world. People enjoy this kind of poetry in part because it is easy to understand, although that is typically not its only strength.