>David Kennedy wrote:
>> Yes, I have this volume which is a gem. If you see any of the old PMPs in
>> secondhand shops then snap'em up. Another goodie would be no 19 which is
>> Ashbery, Harwood and Raworth which I found recently for 1.5 Blair pounds.
I was having a look back at the list of those who were in the PMP series
which ran throughout the 60s and 70s (it's reprinted in the Spring '95 issue
of the Poetry Review). Famously, there are 4 women out of 81. There seems
a terrible chumminess - 'since we have the famous So-and-so, we can squeeze
old Binky in, and what was the name of Piers' cousin, doesn't he write a
bit?' And so there are so many donnish makeweights. But of course, these
comments come with a young Turk's hindsight.
Incidentally, lest one should make a terrible gaffe in literary circles ,
with Rioja in one hand and something green on a Ritz cracker in the other -
I'm told these books should be referred to as PIMMIPs and not PEE-EM-PEEs.
>> With very few exceptions - the Denise Riley one - the new series just
>> doesn't seem as good.
Well that seems just a tiny bit over-partisan, David. They weren't aimed at
poetry-wallahs like ourselves. It's odd you should refer to the new PMPs in
the present tense, since they are missing presumed deceased. The series ran
from mid 1995 until mid 1998. Thanks Penguin! Presumably they gave up when
they ran out of cash cow names. There was some wincing 'theming', some
rather premature inclusions, token exotica, ghastly covers, all of which
could have been forgiven if they had remembered the whole point (and reason
for success) of the originals was a cheap cover price which opened poetry to
students and other poor cats.
And so alas, we will never see the Kennedy, Kitson, Lumsden volume.
Roddy
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