I think "metapoetic" is pretty apt, from what I've read, and the connection
to Beckett superceding the early influence of Dylan Thomas makes sense too.
There's a surrender to strangeness--most obviously in "Imagine a Forest"
(stunning poem!), but also operating on the atmospherics of _Mooney_--and a
persistent preoccupation with the concluding question (or possible answers
to it) of "Letter VI"--"What shall I answer for?"--don't you think?
Does this have anything to do with Robin's (mysterious) reference to an
"Apocalypse movement"? What? And what was that movement?
Candice
on 8/5/01 8:19 PM, Matthew Francis at [log in to unmask]
wrote:
> I suppose once you start putting sics in poetry, you never stop.
>
> Yes, something certainly did change around 1955, though it's difficult to
> explain. In fact crazy syntax and imagery are more characteristic of the
> early poems - my choice of these was rather conservative, so that isn't as
> clear as it should be from the website. As for the ear references, it's a
> preoccupation with the difference between speech and writing - the change
> from speech to writing, ear to eye, is usually seen in the late poems as
> loss, or even as a fall from Paradise. If they refer to the ear more, it's
> in elegaic mode, just as the poems Robin mentioned mourn his dead friends,
> and another group of poems tries to summon up his lost childhood in
> nostalgic dreams. Are they philosophic? It depends what you mean by the
> word. I think of them as metapoetic, endlessly exploring their own status as
> language objects. And this is actually something that can be traced
> throughout his career - thematically his poetry is much more unified than at
> first appears. The difference between the early poems and the late ones is
> more a matter of tone and technique than of content. Nevertheless, it's a
> huge difference, and I still don't really understand why and how it
> happened.
>
> Best wishes
>
> Matthew
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Candice Ward" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Sunday, August 05, 2001 9:25 PM
> Subject: Re: HG my name JG my game WS wont same
>
>
>> Well, I wasn't proposing "L=A=N=G-Pig" too seriously--but have in the
>> meantime read a chunk of _Malcolm Mooney's Land_, including the
>> "grammarsow...word-louse" bit. (Why no "sic" for Graham's twist on
>> "woodlouse," too?)
>>
>> MML strikes me as more of a narrative poem than a philosophical one (on
> the
>> basis of partial reading only, though), but rereading those earlier and
>> later poems you've got posted at your website, Matthew, made see why Robin
>> senses a lyric-to-philosophic development in Graham. Something seems to
> have
>> blown through and shaken up the work round about 1955, going by the
> website
>> selection and grossly generalizing from it admittedly. The poems from the
>> 1940s seem quite conventional to me, but with "Letter VI" there's a sense
> of
>> rattled syntax and ruptured imagistic-sensory foundations, of the first
>> line's "wind" to the penultimate line's "roar" throwing everything up in
> the
>> air (and into question) aesthetically like a tornado in an art museum. Nd
>> the poems that come later are so much more preoccupied with "space" and
> the
>> "abstract" (recurring terms in MML too) than the early, more temporally
>> focused poems. That shift from time lyric to a more expansive and
> spatially
>> conscious poem seems also to have coincided with a shift from the visual
> to
>> the aural, with "ear" recurring as often as "space" and "abstract" in the
>> poems of the 1970s (again, going by this small but perhaps representative
>> sample).
>>
>> Does this mark a shift from the lyrical to the philosophical, though? I
>> don't know and wouldn't want to say on the basis of so few poems, but I'd
> be
>> interested in how it seems to you, Robin, or others here who know Graham's
>> work better (and know more of it) than I do.
>>
>> Candice
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