Not much to say about this, being outside the arena and not having read
Firebox - tho I was only yesterday thumbing through Hugh McDiarmid and
found this:
... So the English literary world
Is an immense arena
Where every spectator is intent
On the deaths of those awaiting judgement
And every gladiator is intent
On causing the death of his fellow-combatant
By smiting him with the corpses
Of other pre-deceased.
Which I thought quite funny.
I do find such debates intensely depressing, although I recognise their
worth - a grasshopper wanderer in the thickets of poetry, I had not heard
of poets like Douglas Oliver, Denise Riley, Peter Riley or Trevor Joyce
before I joined this list, and thought of contemporary English poetry as
a wasteland of attenuated pseudo-lyric or brash young comic rhymers. (A
travesty, naturally...) I wondered vaguely why poets like Peter Redgrove
and others weren't on everybody's lips, but at the time was too busy
reading European poetry in translation to think much about it. I
thought, for my purposes, that was where the action was. But English
remains my language, and what interests me most intensely is what is
written for English: and it seems a shame that much of the most vital
writing in the language is not more generally available. For reasons
that, frankly, I don't understand, and perhaps don't wish to. But there
is much I don't understand.
Given that, the arguments raise what seem to me artificial divisions, not
the least damaging aspect of them - there are many discussions here which
stem from the common wealth of a shared and rich tradition of English
poetry (not just poetry in English), which begs a different sort of
assumption.
Best
Alison
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