it's late for me as well as Robin Purves & i'm not sure that i really want
to be taking on this subject & my comments are at a tangent, a very wide
outgoing tangent, to the keston-started thread, regard the title of this
posting as a header of convenience, however:
I hold these truths to be self-evident (flourish!):
1. that the notion of an 'avant-garde' or equivalent is obsolete, pertaining
as it does to conditions in the late 19th century/early 20th century.
2. that the notion of a 'mainstream' is equally obsolete and potentially
even more regressive, invoking as it does a stunting of curiosity and
one-dimensionality of language that preserves the dialect of a 'traditional'
middle-class that is already in dissolution.
3. that the way forward for the Way of Poetry, if any, must involve a
plurality of voices and a democracy of mind. that it must seek to re-unite
the emotionally arrested language of the intellect and the analytically
challenged slippery lyrics of feeling, the high and low of the art, in a
matchmaker's hope of their ever-to-be-togetherness and mutual regeneration.
4. that Modernism triumphed, and that triumph was in many respects a
disaster, for it can be seen world-wide in the heart of our cities and their
no-places of concrete. just as current working-places and environments are
often chapter upon chapter of 'defamiliarization' in its soulless pomp.
5. that we're on our own in this, in the middle of our 'global village', and
that no amount of appealing to precedents or begging the sanction of
critical authorities will help.
6. that we must never forget the past, because it's 'all happened before',
and will so again, but the ultimate we can learn from what's gone before is,
pace Hopkins, 'to admire and do otherwise'.
I've had enough of this now, as it feels like a bloody sermon
regards
david
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