Scott Hamilton:
<<
"Les Murray writing of
Martin Johnston's To the Innate Island:-
"It's wonderfully rich, evocative and vivacious, but I
fear
you've left the poetry out"
Les can keep his poetry!
I prefer Martin Johnston any day
Could Les Murray ever give a poem a title like 'The
Blood Aquarium'????
Or how about
"On Zeeland shore a whale rots, waiting for Durer"
That's worth the complete works of Murray, Heaney (the
Murray of Ireland, with all that implies?) and the
rest of the 21st century patoralist nationalists.
>>
Scott,
Forgive me if I've out of sync with this thread...
but certainly many fine writers have suffered unkinder cuts
than "you’ve left the poetry out." All editors (not to mention
critics and you & I) are subject to biases & vexed by
critical blindspots.
I agree a good title is an asset to a poem…but surely it’s only
the jumping off place; the poem's got do a pike, tuck,
and several tightly executed spins into a full layout, all the
while avoiding the rockface, before hitting the water and
making a perfect, nearly splashless, entry (if you like poems
with a swift, sure close, that is) before it can justify the lofty
crag it has selected (for a title). Not to mention those
great poems with lackluster titles or those with no title at all…
tho the first line always becomes the title de facto.
I think given the politics driving land development
and mega-corporate-farming taking place in many parts
of the planet being a pastoralist, even a nostalgic one,
makes one a political poet.
Pride in one’s heritage/birthplace/homeland (even a
colonized one) doesn’t make one a nasty nationalist?
And ethnic poetry often is tied closely to (lost) homeland
or mother country; nothing there to necessarily disparage.
Finnegan
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