The July 2013 issue of Harper’s has an article that has sparked considerable amounts of debate in the world of contemporary poetry. Mark Edmundson’s “Poetry Slam: Or, The Decline of American Verse” is being widely responded to. (There’s a link, but you need a subscription or to pick up an actual copy of the magazine.) A smattering of links:

Ron Charles immediately reported on Edmundson’s polemic in The Washington Post with “Why is Modern Poetry So Bad?” (Though his use of “modern” in the title probably signals a certain ignorance of twentieth and twenty-first century poetry . . . .)

The University of Pittsburgh’s own Dawn Lundy Martin has weighed in with “In Defense of-.”

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