would it be a post-modern bar?
and would it also be post -modern booze?
cheers from me!
----- Original Message -----
From: Peter Riley <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, June 13, 2001 12:07 PM
Subject: Advanced grade


> It's very devout of Tim to go through those hurriedly-written epistles of
> mine so studiously responding to everything point by point, agreeing and
> disagreeing, asking for clarifications, extending thoughts to other
> scenarios, putting words into my mouth... etc.  But I feel that to respond
> to him properly, to tackle every point he raises, for this I'd need a day
> off. And some of us are working people.
>
> So rather than "discuss" I just issue statements, like a row of tulips
> springing from certain points of his two letters.
>
>
> 1. I have a lot of trouble with late Beethoven string quartets (and
> everything that follows from them) because in them the author no longer
> views himself as a kind of servant whose duty is to supply beautiful music
> to people for their for consolation and delight, but as an "artist"
> revealing to the world the profundity and suffering of his soul.  The
> art-work has ceased to be ornamental.  Very "impressive" or course.  Give
> me Boccherini any day.
>
> On the seriousness (and purpose) of ornament, see William Blake, Songs of,
> this and that...   Or maybe Haydn's late Adagio movements.
>
>
> 2.  There must be a Greek term for the rhetorical process of taking direct
> statements, translating them into specialised vocabularies (Marx, Freud,
> sociology) finding they don't fit, and then delivering them back as weird
> aberrances from what "everybody" thinks.
>
>
> 3.  Where does this rule come from that says women poets have to have
women
> mentors, as if they constitute a sub-species?  Robert Duncan, I recall,
was
> one of the first to explore the Stein mode.  Most of the high quality
> poetical writing by women that's been coming from America in the last ten
> years seems to me to balance itself mainly between Shakespeare (or Keats)
> on the one hand, and a modern climate with people like Reverdy or O'Hara
at
> the core of it, on the other. Stein seems a less significant influence,
> more of an ikon than a working factor.  I don't find her negative so much
> as coy.
>
>
> 5.  Such is the confusion surrounding "post-modern" that whereas the term
> might be used creatively to encompass the breakdown of elitist and
> institutional focusing modes and an opening out to all kinds and sorts of
> human endeavour -- licensing the inquiring spirit -- like taking 1950s New
> Orleans R&B just as seriously as bebop;  it is more likely to be made to
> prioritise no more than the switching off of the censor mechanism.
> Producing emotionless manipulation, interest in nothing but the dreary
> furniture of the selfhood, continua of suspended animation, like it all
> goes on and nothing matters, which is the very opposite.  Guesses as to
> whose poetry I'm referring to here may be sent in small brown envelopes to
> the Mikado. And all it ever meant really (where it began, in architecture)
> was that it was a later manner than the one that came before it.
>
>
> 4. I actually doubt if Andrew Duncan is really interested in poetry at
all.
> He's interested in the national socio-political determinative occasion of
> poetry, almost as if it is all really written by the Prime Minister.
>
>
> I shall be in and out of a bar "somewhere in France" for a few weeks.
>
>
>
> /PR