> David
>
> I got there all right, but when i clicked on the review I got


St-range. I'll ask Andrew to have a word with the site owner (are you a Mac
user, Doug?) but in the meantime I have no doubt it is perfectly permissible
for me to paste the file into the body of this message. So here it be:

(regards Dave)

>Andrew Duncan, An inside with no outside: Foil: defining poetry 1985-2000
(ed. Nicholas Johnson, etruscan books, 2000, ISBN 1 901 538 28; £8.50, 395
pp.)
Foil counts 33 poets, and is 400 pages long: CANDESCENT in the glare of
omissions, REARED to epic length by monumental errors of judgment,
REDEMPTIVELY it is bathed in dazzling rays from the future. Roughly, they
are the generation born in the 1960s and early 1970s, excepting those who
want to be McGough or Larkin. Or Joni Mitchell. Foil is unrivalled, opulent,
far gone. It is also a kind of storage warehouse where bales of sleazoid
academicism, careerist finger-painting, and avant-garde pastoral are a
cartonnage to protect the fabric of brilliant poems from daylight. As a new
cultural pattern emerges, an array of 30 poetic arrays, linked to each other
by symmetries and oppositions, a debate is opening which, alas, I cannot
predict. This will be an ideal-type description, inaccurate for unusual
poets - Helen Macdonald's work, for example, sophisticated and
three-dimensional.

We look at maybe 15 radiant new poets, and add 15 new years to the curve, to
the extent of British poetry. We see their withdrawal from politics, and
from exploring emotional experience. After a crisis of legitimation, we find
the restoration of a scale of prestige. Above is now linked to below in a
stable way. The introduction draws our attention to visual poetry, to
'environments', to the return of the body and the oral, to performance:
conceptual innovations of the early sixties. IBM was then, is not now a high
growth stock; the new era has no wilderness to stake out, its
self-definition is on the fine scale. The canard about the period is that it
has seen no masterpieces; it may be that an era of mass higher education and
distributed functions does not want language as symbolic power, and so we
have delicate chamber poetry. Perhaps we are delicate enough to listen to
it?

The tariff structure seems to be that knowledge acquired from speculation,
or from philosophers, is superior to knowledge that comes from intuition and
from inside. Theories are expensive and exclusive, feelings are commonplace.
Personal experience, in relationships and real-world situations, has been
reshelved as a kitchen art, less white than white goods. Hmmm. Feelings are
Stone Age software but are not the Stone Age of software.

The editor has remarked that the poets don't believe in the counter-culture.
Autonomy is not located in a possible new society but in a reduction of
scale; a virtual object, a consistency wrapped in a paradox, affluent or
ludicrous, programmable and waiting to acquire features. Perhaps we no
longer believe in a transformation of social relations, while a
transformation of the information patterns by which we produce, amuse our
brains, and earn money, is inevitable. The ability to learn (docility) means
employment success.

Each folio of poems is the product of a game; each, the application of a
procedure which develops a virtual space. The poem game is like an exotic
virtual toy, which fascinates by metamorphosing. It contains information,
but only about itself; though we explore, there is nothing to explore.
Eliminating reference to a self, it is self-referential.

A game is repeatable ad lib., that is, you can always start again at the
system origin. It has a non-recursive point; that is, it has a zero or
system origin which is not conditioned by any previous moves. Later moves
are recursive (that is, defined by preceding moves), and the "richness" of
each move is related to the density of its implications for succeeding
moves, but also to the amount of effective data which is new and not fixed
by previous moves. A good game is, for one thing, one in which the ratio of
implication (implexity?) to explanation is high. A game may involve
planning, probability, pattern matching, memory, and gaining virtual assets.
If it is possible to invent the rules of games, there must be a set of rules
by which the game-rules are generated and controlled, at a deeper layer of
arbitrariness and compulsion. Inventing games is a kind of game. Niall
Quinn, Nic Laight and Nick Macias are poets who have devised geometrical
spaces which allow great kinetic excitement, impressively combining
transparency and complexity. It may be that we could regard all software as
a set of mathematical puzzles; and all poems as mathematical puzzles, local
cases of information theory. Imagining the good society was like a game, a
sublime zero followed by a cascade of implication.

Idealism has been abandoned as a motive for deep language. The documentary
project now seems to have been part of socialism, and the project of
self-knowledge and self-expression to have been part of Protestantism; what
was a pleasure then. The relation between signs and any inner processes, has
been suspended. Sympathy, attachment, identification, are not on the scene.
All this is parallel to the New Gen crew.

Instead of identifying, we are in the poem like mice in a polychrome maze.
The withdrawal from the multiplanar cohesion of real-world experience gives
the abiding problem of re-building complexity. This was not, always, present
in the old, character-based, poetry. One must admit that some poets have
very boring personalities; if you read RS Thomas, you will notice that the
same few ideas occur again and again. So in theory he is free to be diverse,
but what he has chosen is a very simple rule-set which repeats itself in a
short time and which has been running for sixty years (it seems like more).
Artificial rule-sets can easily be more complex, and have more scatter in
their results, than "organic" ones. Let's not try to name the winners when
we haven't yet worked out the new rules of the game. That someone will be
surpassed and destroyed, is clear.

A rule is that the high:low dimension of poetry is now also the
depersonalisation: identifying/autobiographical contrast. Sharing is the
surrender of distinction. The quality for which poets strive has shifted
away from authenticity and towards virtuality. The high prestige of
virtuality corresponds to the low prestige of making things, e.g. cars. The
admired formula is: arbitrary rules consistently applied. Two match-winners
for depersonalisation might be these. First, naive poets assume that you're
fascinated by their feelings, and write poems which just don't stand up on
paper, without their composer being present in the room. Better poets write
poems which are self-standing, away from the self they refer to. It was easy
to deduce that poems which didn't refer to a personality at all were the
most sophisticated. Secondly, boredom with identity politics, something
which went on for far too long. Alert poets were bound to dissimilate from
this central, accessible, sludge. Dissimilation is vital to prestige, while
also abandoning territory where, indeed, happiness would have been possible.

American carnivals had a clown called the bozo, whose patter was drawn
entirely from reshaping what the audience said to him - an improvisation of
precise timing, at risk from the rubes. Khaled Hakim is a bozo on the loose
among the culturati, reflexivity on legs, ignoring the rule that analysis is
what you do to lower-status people. His work is an act of gratitude for the
trauma of having other people demonstrate how well they know your culture.
His evocation of overgrown, blown, briar-draggled wild patches of Birmingham
is extraordinarily touching.

I also think wistfully of poets who aren't included, points on a bigger and
better curve. You can't write DS Marriott out of history.


----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas Barbour" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, June 15, 2001 3:59 PM
Subject: Re: Foil'd Again


> David
>
> I got there all right, but when i clicked on the review I got
>
> error 404: File not found
>
> The document you requested is not found.
>
> And that's where I'm stuck for now...
>
> Doug
>
> Douglas Barbour
> Department of English
> University of Alberta
> Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
> (h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
>
> We speak
> and as we stop we forget
> even to be alone is to repeat.
> (A silence's potential is to be infinitely printable.)
>
> Clark Coolidge
>