I do need to apologize for having sent the message about "Englsi men" to
the list several useless times.
I know that the reiteration of my suggestions would not necessarily
persuade them following those lists of new behaviours. Moreover,
I did not mean to write what I did. I regret that I even conceived those
ideas on English men. I think there is a proportion of them who in fact do
shave their armpits and who do not take their wives or girlfriend to Ibiza
to enslave them on holiday.
I am also convinced that the majority of them find, for instance, pretty
tolerable that a poet like Craig Raine would write and publish whatever he
likes, or see that one is entitled to do so, as an artist. I am equally
convinced that those who think they have the authority to criticize and
censor mister Craig Raine, who is in fact a good poet, from a moral point
of view, as appeared in several articles scattered on various literary
magazines around the UK, belong to the rare and still enlisted category of
those who pity their fathers and hate their mothers for some unuttered
history of family trauma they might have had when kids.
In fact, from a general ethical point, it is more questionable to publish
on Poetry Reviews, (Vol. 91, no 3, Autumn 2001) an article such as the one
by Rod Mengham, entitled “Voyeur’s Verse”, that being a voyeur. The review
in question lack critical subtleness, and only conveys a rather spiteful
outlook on mister Raine’s private life and feelings (that he , being a
regularly published poet, made of course public – as one would expect a
poet and a write to do). Rod Meghan , with an epigrammnatic desire to
impress the audience in the very opening of his review states:
“Nothing exceeds like excess”
and then continues:
“Raine is much less a critic than a reviewer”
a comment that seems rather acute if turned back like a boomerang against
himself.
Then he proceeds in his attack on Raine, defining him “self-concerned”, and
in doing so he is trying to come out, but very weakly, on what exactly,
according to his critical authority, poetry should deal and be concerned
with , talk about, relate to (we understand should not at all be self-
concerned. )
I know that this was a quite elliptic way to address the question of the
fairly recent attacks on Craig Raine and also a quite rather unexpected
hints of reflection upon an issue such as what is ethical, in poetry
matters and who is authorized to impart lessons to other poets about what
they should or should not write. Maybe there is such an answer.
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