ron slate on four poetry anthologies

Burlesque, artifice and camp. Lara Glenum reminds us that Susan Sontag opened the aperture when in “Notes on Camp” she wrote, “The essence of Camp is the love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration … Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style – but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off,’ of things-being-what-they-are-not.” The gurlesque poets often mock their culture by playing the sorts of tricks on readers that are played on women when they walk down the sidewalk.