Meant to send this to the list earlier, but somehow sent it to Alison only,
so apologies to Alison for that. Anyway...
>I've been interested to hear the views of people outside Britain about the
>stratification of the poetry scene here. I got interested in contemporary
>poetry about seven years ago, and since then I've felt more and more
>frustrated by what seems to be almost a Cold War situation. I respect Ric's
>point about the exclusion of avant-garde poetry, but I wonder whether all
>'mainstream' poets need to bear the responsibility for Arts Council
>philistinism? Chomsky pointed to the fact that the Cold War was a mutually
>beneficial enterprise which allowed both sides to consolidate their power at
>home. If we accept the dichotomy between avant-garde and 'mainstream' styles
>(never mind the complexities within either loose grouping) does this not
>simply allow both to carry on relatively unchallenged, consolidating their
>social positions (apply for a Gregory award and dream about the Whitbread OR
>go to Cambridge and read Hegel)?
>
>Speaking as someone who has enjoyed work from both sides of the curtain, I
>can't say a better attempt has been made to bring about the thaw than that
>made by John Kinsella with Salt and Stand: his commitment to avant-garde
>poetics doesn't preclude him from appreciating other work, and it's
>interesting to note that he has argued in the introduction to Landbridge as
>elsewhere that similar divides in Australian verse between the Generation of
>68 and the Lehmann / Murray camp are 'of little interest' to contemporary
>writers. I feel it to be more sad than ironic that we need writers from
>elsewhere to do the job we should be doing for ourselves, i.e. fostering
>dialogue rather than stand-off. I would like to see a situation where
>mainstream poets were informed by the various excellent challenges to poetic
>practice such as Andrew Crozier's 'Thrills and Frills: poetry as figures of
>empirical lyricism.' I'd also like avant-garde poets to stop complaining about
>the 1982 Penguin anthology and admit that the work of Paul Muldoon among
>others cannot simply be dismissed as Martianism gone mad.
>
>Now I'm off to hide from the impending deluge...
>
>Malcolm Phillips
>
>P.S. to Peter Riley - I'm going to take you up on the challenge to do a
>syllable count on rap music, using as representative a sample as I can of the
>different styles since '89. It'll take a while as I have other things to do,
>but I'm looking forward to seeing the results...
>
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