It seems that I was premature in hoping for constructive postings from
this source.
The level of lack-of-engagement with the poems thus beer-matted (a
casualness of which SP seems proud, for some unaccountable reason) is
truly staggering, particularly from one who was accusing others of pack
judgement. It's only with great reluctance that I go back to this, since
there seems very little possibility of progress, but to take one example
of an injustice, which needs to be rectified:
> Ulli Freer
> Fragmento
> reminds one of Amy Lowell and her penchant for baubles and Latinated
> words
Stephen, you must see the idiocy of such a statement. Like, what's
Lowell/bauble/"latinated" about:
a curt snarl
dusts corrupted
towed tweeds
how the policy rusted
clasps closed spine
held a caller
peak pack
ante
purse sharing stake brilliant
diapered to form
to disappear
There seems to me to be about this a kind of sprung energy, an insistance
on the _values_ of the words, a deliberation, which is way beyond such
casualisation of response, and which, even if you can't appreciate what's
going on, ought to demand more respect than the silly one-liner you give
it. Had you, for instance, gone a click away, you'd have found a good
introduction to some of what's going on in Freer, by Robert Sheppard:
http://www.jacket.zip.com.au/jacket09/sheppard-freer.html
- or your could simply "stand up and use your ears" etc.
I find none of Freer's qualities of deliberation, of sustained energy, or
of focused _making_, about your own trivial squib:
> weep no more for people
> are no more than words
> and ten or twenty in a pie
> make for a Wallace Steven's parody
- etc., for some time, without wit or rhythm as far as I can see, or
indeed anything much other than vindictiveness, a characteristic I'm
finding increasingly evident in your work.
Returning to your beer-mat notes, which as I see it firmly give the lie to
any claims you once made to be "genuinely interested" in ways of reading,
or to have any "constructive" intent such as you claimed: as I see it,
your entire purpose here was the rather petty aim of lumpen-disposal of an
area of poetry: you wrote: "I read the poems in John Tranter's Jacket
volume 10 which as a sample are quite representative of contemporary
Anglo-American-Aussie poetics." I wonder if anyone would agree with you in
this facile judgement - but, frankly, I have to ask how you feel about
yourself with such a petty and negative ambition? As I've said before,
your inability to progress beyond such snideness is your own loss all the
way, though it remains, on this list, a waste of space, an inconvenience
to genuine discussion, and an abuse of the openness of the list. You
once gave me your assurance (backchannel) that you wouldn't abuse the
list any more. Will you keep your word?
RC
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