Thanks to all who summarised Cork 2000/#4--and above all to all those who
read and attended readings.
A quick response to Randolph Healy's unease with a term I used to describe
his and others' poetry in the book Billy Mills (et al) were kind enough to
plug.
Randolph writes that he is "disconcerted by the description 'neo-avant
garde' which seems to want to massage an entire bus queue simultaneously
while wearing oven gloves and stilts. I don't think any of the work
mentioned bears any resemblance to such an entity." Neatly put, as always,
Randolph--but your syntax, if not your imagery, seems to want to both deny
and admit the existence of work that can be categorised as
"neo-avant-garde". For my own part, I find the label useful as a way of
(albeit, crudely) grouping certain contemporary poets, and infinitely
preferable to the catch-all, and thus empty, term "postmodern(ist)". In
the Devlin book, I used the phrase purely as a _chronological_ marker, that
is, as a way of distinguishing certain forms of writing that clearly take
their bearings from earlier currents of modernist practice from the
"historical avant-garde" of the early twentieth century. Obviously, such a
conceptualisation does not originate with me, but with Peter Burger's
valuable (though contentious) _Theory of the Avant-Garde_, which, in turn,
informs Hal Foster's brilliant reworking of the concepts in _The Return of
the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century_. My aim in the book
was to respect the particularity of each poet's work which I choose to
discuss, but also to see it in _relation to_ (not as a continuum but as
part of the "broken line" of) the rich tradition of modernist poetry in
Ireland from Yeats to the present.
Sorry you couldn't make it this year, Randolph.
Yours,
Alex Davis
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