David K >Oh get over yersel', big man! This sounds like a massively
ill-informed
>dismissal of strategies common to a multiplicity of innovative poetries to
>me and, by implication, of those poetries themselves. Won't do, really
won't
>do at all.


Peter H >"I'd side with Roddy on this one. Certainly the techniques were
*once*
innovative, but anyone using them today is more than likely to be aping
that innovation.  But I suspect there is a bit of cross-purposeness in the
discussion,
with some talking about whether ampersands &c could ever have been used
to interesting effect (of course they could), and others more concerned
about the validity of their use today (much more difficult)."

My previous words: I find ampersands in poems are often 'compensatory
gestures' along with centering text, beginning of line caps in non formal
work, font changes, over-short lines, strange tabulation, mid-word
enjambment, stepped verses.

Well, David, you really are wrong about my motives for this.  Honest.  I'm
not beyond lashing out from my corner as sometime mainstream whipping boy
here :-))).  (Where is the emoticon that expresses mac and cycle clips?)
But not this time, though I can understand why you've misunderstood me and
I'm keen to redress that.  I feel that when innovative poets use some of the
things I mentioned, they often do so for reasons which are inherent to the
way they choose to work.  This is a different situation to what riles me -
mainly mainstream poets who tart up their work with gestures eg ampersands
in work which endlessly and badly parodies Bukowski or Williams or cummings
and others; eg font changes for no decipherable reason; eg over-short lines
which mistake stop-start brevity and down-page drizzle for Zen
enlightenment; eg mid-word enjambment, which I've seen used brilliantly but
is generally an affected way of covering up laziness in metrical work.

Re caps at line beginnings, I retain them in sonnets etc because I think
them a part of those forms, but avoid them otherwise.  A poet like Elizabeth
Jennings is likely to use them all the time, but she's of a generation when
it was the norm.  In free or lyric verse now, it can be like wearing spats,
brogues and a trilby with your Stussy gear.  It'll change again, no doubt.

I'm not equating use of these things with the idea of the compensatory
gesture, nor am I questioning their use in poetry other than the
contemporary, merely expressing tiredness with those who use the Alt and
Ctrl buttons as interior designers.

Peter's point about debatably 'innovative' poets who are borrowing the
gestures of the innovators of yesteryear is of course a fascinating and
relevant one, but I think I might stay out of that thread, though I'm keen
to see it continue.

yrs with 'The Movement's not Dead' tattooed on one arm & 'Never Trust a
Hippy' on t'other.

Roddy



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