To resume  (sorry I've lost the correct subject headings)

Looking at Tomlinson again has reminded me what it was that made young
poets opt for America in the 1960s.  There are many interesting texts and I
know he has been a liberating influence on a lot of younger poets .  But I
get the same feeling reading him as with most of Hughes or Heaney. It's the
feeling of a barrier or vacuum between the poetry and the world because the
poetry is poetically-determined within a short history.   Early middle or
late doesn't seem to me to make much difference to this, though I think
most of the best stuff is probably mid-60s questing material.  There is a
besetting metaphorism, the dominant mode of the academised post-Movement,
which he never really cast aside. I find him using terms like   explosion
of flowers   in 1955 and in 1980    which hang so stagnantly there, so
unnecessarily achieved. Moving towards "Martians" more than anything: a
conjuror's display, poet as  comparison-expert.  Those tropes, always
tropes of poetry which determine the substance: that what is said and the
way the world is approached--- the whole cast of the work---  is so much
what poets do the way poets do it , and the recognition afforded is first
and foremost of claiming that role, and only secondarily an interpretation
of the world.   I don't have this trouble with Roy Fisher whose metrics
seem to be grounded on a longer history and a more deeply personal
involvement. He and Christopher Middleton represent that "moment" most
fully for me.

We turned from that kind of thing to people who might have been hesitant to
called themselves "poet" at all, who were obsessed with content, with an
urgency to speak which cast manner into the ditch, and to whom the
formulation of "poem" was a matter of spiky nerve-ridden improvisation in a
virtuosic language spread, calling on facts and wild leaps of the mind
rather than the comfort of a poetry-zone.   Of course it couldn't last for
long.

We must be grateful for everything we get. I am not necessarily speaking of
the quality of Mr Tomlinson's writing, but if its kind at a certain
juncture, and what its use might be to persons of a certain inclination.


/PR







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