I like that.
The Edwardian Madox double Ford was working, writing, editing within a
culture that carried still a believeable fiction of a 'centre'. And a
liter-arty one too. Nowadays, noway, but it seems to my hurried eye that
both the 'mainstream' and the 'alternative' broods act as if that
'centrality' still existed. (And wage war upon each other for an empty
citadel.)
Whereas, as Alison says, poetry really inhabits the margins.
I think a 'Book of Margins' is what any open anthology should be, of
whatever nationality.
david bircumshaw
----- Original Message -----
From: <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, December 12, 2000 7:16 PM
Subject: Re: chaos
> David wrote:
>
> >MacDiarmid has something
> >on the lines of 'disinteredness, our profoundest word yet'. It that
quality,
> >disinteredness, that the poetic culture today seems largely to have
forsook.
>
> Perhaps "disinterest" has been obscured by the fear of public uninterest,
> and consequent over-compensating and self-defeating self-interest. The
> first time I went into a bookshop which had no poetry section (I mean, a
> bookshop which claimed it sold literature) I simply didn't believe there
> wasn't one, and hunted round in circles for an embarassingly long time
> until I was forced to admit that, yes, poetry just simply wasn't on the
> shelves and apparently didn't count as literature.
>
> There are quite a lot of bookshops like that around. Today I went into a
> bookshop which stocked a beautiful artbook on Ian Hamilton Finlay, and a
> reasonably interesting selection of books on everything from art to
> military history - but no poetry at all. I found this odd. And it does
> mean that that mantra "poetry doesn't sell" is self-fulfilling. I mean,
> you can't sell it if it isn't there.
>
> Not that this is really a question of selling. But this inevitably
> pervasive sense of being marginalised can have the effect on poets of
> being traduced to a special pleading, a sense that poetry has to be
> apologised for somehow, justified, explained, diminished. On the other
> hand, the margins are the freest and most interesting places to be.
>
> Best
>
> Alison
>
|