I don't agree with this at all, but there are some interesting things to think about within the text.
I think his point is this: The experiments with form that have been going on since the beginning of poetry (or at least since George Herbert wrote "Easter Wings" in 1633) continue in new mostly unread or unreadable ways. Sadly, I have an opinion and it is this: There's more poetry worth thinking about in the hubskiverse than in the items referred to in the New Yorker column. I confess, I looked up Josef Kaplan's Kill List for you all. What d'ya think?
Yeah, I should have been more specific with what I didn't agree with. I think you're right that the point is experimentation, though the article focuses really narrowly on the experimental nature of some of the poetry that came out of the 1960's. To me, a big difference is seems to be in presentation (as there was no internet at the time). Then as now, people had to go out of their way to encounter poems instead of wandering a vast space where some faceless person has housed poems. From what I know of poetry at that time, people also tended to be more familiar with poems and poets, and had more background to compare what they were hearing or reading. I just glanced at Kill List and even though I wasn't expecting much, I still felt a bit let down. It looked like a series of index cards. I'll make an effort to check out the other stuff listed in the article, but honestly that sample left me with the same feeling I had of some Dadaist stuff from a hundred years ago. Conceptual art can be brilliant, brilliant on-paper and not brilliant at all. I certainly don't feel that Kill List is brilliant on paper.
What the author appears to be discussing in this article doesn't seem like straight poetry to me any more than performance art is considered straight art, and so therefore using these "performance poetry" pieces as examples by which to brand the entire genre seems as erroneous to me as concluding that performance art is the only art that's occurring any more. Obviously other forms of art are alive and well and the same is the case for poetry. Moreover, performance poetry, as well as performance art, are only one small genre of a very large field, and both are kind of off the beaten path. Taking what is going on in either genre as even a bellwether for what is going on in each world as a whole seems inadvisable to me. I did enjoy some of the links. Unfortunately right now I'm unable to access Kill List.
I adore 419 eater but this one (linked to in the article) I had never seen before. 250 pages of handwritten Harry Potter. My God. The evil genius.