On Thu, 3 Feb 2000, Malcolm Phillips wrote:

> >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

I think we'd better qualify the "cold war" analogy before it gets too
deeply engrained, because no-one could possibly argue that there are just
two powers here which one might build a wall between. I think on other
occasions we've agreed that there's all kinds of shades of - what? grey I
suppose, on the spectrum between absolute cutting-edge and absolute old
fogey, so that any attempt to get a clearcut "us" and "them" going is -
happily - doomed to failure. The terms we use - avant garde, experimental,
mainstream etc - are sloppy enough for no-one to be really happy about the
bondaries thereunto, tho they work in a rough-and-ready kind of way, and
to make clearcut oppositions out of the question.  But the general
condition does exist, and one can see it in operation in bookshops, on
the curriculum, in prizes, in anthologies, in magazines, in
"poem-of-the-day/week/etc" in newspapers, in funding, in book-at-bedtime,
so one doesn't really need to waste too much time querying its existence:
there is a cultural hegemony operating here which is operating on a very
restricted character set. "Arts Council philistinism" is no more than a
confirming symptom. I'm glad it ain't the case in Australia, but it's
certainly the case here.

And I certainly don't bracket all mainstreamers together, never have done,
just as I've never denied some of the very evident virtues of some such. 
Some are no doubt very bloody complicit in the malaise described, other
I'm sure less so or not at all. But *in my experience* (I can only speak
from my experience, and add that it is similar to other experiences I've
heard) few are ready to read or appreciate across boundaries (I've
mentioned Anne Stevenson before). Yes, I know that it's possible for an
avantgardiste to be narrow in his/her reading patterns too, but - again in
my experience - it's far less likely:  generally speaking one HAS to read
across the range, and takes some pride in doing so, if one is in any sense
of wanting to move forward. The reviewers of, for instance, "Conductors of
Chaos" who took evident pride in the chauvinistic narrowness of their
response fit the pattern nicely, missing the breadth of reference in that
work in their assurance that their narrow experience was the only relevant
yardstick. 

If we're listing cross-border activity, let's mention Andy Brown's two
"Binary Myths" vols from Stride. I'm not sure they prove what he set out
to prove, but they air responses *across a range* which the hegemony
referred to above couldn't possibly countenance.

This power-struggle stuff, which is nine tenths obvious when you're on the
ground amongst it, and which most of us live with quite calmly without
screaming most of the time, must be SO boring to most people. Getting back
to texts, surely, would be favourite. 

RC 




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