I said I would write more when I had finished the book. I have now finished
reading it. Here are some random preliminary thoughts offered for further
discussion, target practice, whatever. I will be reviewing Foil at length in
The Cortland Review e-zine later in the year in the context of a wider
discussion of poetry anthologies.

The blurb says: ‘Foil is a sounding that excavates writings and performed
space [...]
Performance art, visual writing and photo-text; lyric/experimental poetry,
poetry in Gaelic,
Scots and regional idioms, clash together’

Like all anthologies foil is beast of paradox. Foil's paradox is that it
implies that all the work it collects is related, a feeling reinforced by
the subtitle. And yet, the editor Nicholas Johnson, is at pains to say the
opposite. Here’s some of his assertions from his introduction: ‘This folio
offers a disparate gathering’; ‘I propose no systematic groupings of this
work around specific approaches to language, text and poetry’; ‘Perhaps a
‘non successive continuum’ in not being referential to the writing and
polemic of two previous generations also mirrors their differences’

I do want to take issue with one statement: ‘Being at one remove from the
standardised English education system is one of the few links between this
non-community of writers’. A quick scan of what the book calls the bio-data
of its thirty-three contributors reveals: five PhD’s, six Cambridge
graduates, one graduate of the Slade School of Art and several higher
education teachers.

Nonetheless, even though foil positions itself with what we are obliged to
call innovapoe, I do think that its interest goes beyond that. And that that
interest actually derives from its apparently self-destructing subtitle
'defining poetry 1985-2000'. foil contains quite a lot of work that isn’t
particularly 'radical' eg Danielle Hope and Meg Bateman [although of course
she may be in Gaelic but I can't read it so can't tell]. More to the point,
with obvious exceptions such as Caroline Bergvall, Adrian Clarke, Aaron
Williamson, it would be difficult to argue that most of the book’s writers
have, either by accident or design, not been involved in 'defining' anything
at all.

And I wondered if this was precisely the point. foil enacts a kind of
negative definition because it collects a wide range of work which is
generally excluded from mainstream and innovative anthologies. More to the
point it contains a lot of work which can’t really be called poetry and is
only called poetry because no-one can think of a better word for it. [I
should point out straight away that I’m not about to launch into a ‘it’s
terrible, it doesn’t scan
or rhyme’ diatribe. What I mean is that, to me, it makes less and less sense
to think of a lot
of so-called innovative poetry as poetry. It’s perhaps more a question of
text works or fine art with words or behaviour with/in language.]

So what about these exclusions? I'll try to explain what I mean by comparing
Foil with other recent anthos. Women writers: foil has 12 out of 33. The New
Poetry (1993) which I co-edited had 17 out of 55. Conductors of Chaos had 5
out of 36. Other had 10 out of 55. Then there is writing in regional voices
which here seems to be presented just as it falls i.e. despite foil's
ideologically exuberant introduction, the implication is that this sort of
writing is going on all the time and therefore it's just a part of what's
going on.

Another thing that occurred to me was that foil in some way seems to tap
into lost or forgotten modes of writing. For example, it seems to contain a
lot of work that asks to be read as a dream journey, which as Alan Halsey
mentioned in another thread some while back, is a persistent and undervalued
English genre.

Not much else to say, really. Except, I think the book is pretty good value
at 6.95 Blair pounds although I wish it hadn't been produced to the size and
weight of a block of supermarket cheese. Also I was pleased to discover
Richard A Makin who I'd not read before and would recommend. Exciting
language scans and mega-mixes. I was also very impressed by Khaled Hakim who
has one piece called 'Letter to Antin' [yes, that Antin] which I would also
recommend. Oh and I have read the Dun that others have been talking about
and thought that, while it was clearly a dream journey of the type mentioned
above and therefore perhaps noteworthy for that reason, the actual writing
was pretty overspiced and overcooked. Just as Sting is music for people who
don't really like music, it seems to be innovapoe for people who don't
really like it.

Here endeth Dr Kennedy's Sunday Supplement
cheers
David




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