On Mon, 10 Jan 2000, Peter Riley wrote:
> "we" (a surprising number
> of British poets; among present company I'd say: me, John Temple, John
> Hall, Ric Caddel, Doug Oliver, Tom Raworth, Allen Fisher (though most of
> the poets I'm thinking of seem not yet to be on e-mail which is interesting
> in itself)) we "turned to America" and in so doing rejected an english
> line (though it was a line of no historical depth)
- greatly flattered to be included here, but I think I was too young to be
in that first (early to mid '60s) turning. By the time I was looking
around (and, to be sure, reading with relish and avidity the American
Greats which were so thoroughly denied to me on any of my courses) there
was a cogent number of a-little-bit-elders who'd already done it, some of
whom appear on Peter's list above, so that I was coming across, almost
simultaneously, Olson, Duncan, Williams, Pound, Dorn, Snyder, Creeley,
Niedecker, Oppen, Rakosi, Reznikoff, Jones, Bunting, MacDiarmid, Turnbull,
Shayer, Fisher R., Pickard, MacSweeney, Prynne, assorted Rileys, Raworth,
Harwood, Torrance, Chaloner etc etc., I was coming across these all at the
same time. Gosh n golly I was confused but happy. I blame that Tom
Pickard, whose Ultima Thule Bookshop was the source of most of my reading
at that time.
To me (and I don't feel I was typical, since I was a music student, not at
that point a literature student at all) this represented so many much
brighter options than the movement/the new poetry, which, broadly, seemed
the alternatives. Musically, the list above offers far more possibilities
than an equivalent list drawn from Alvarez etc. About the only exception
I'd make wd be Gunn, who at that time was wasting his time (it seemed to
me) with syllabics - I couldn't get on with his work until he'd become
americanised, when I re-appraised.
Sweeping stuff. But then, they were fairly sweeping times.
RC
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