Well I have to shrink it to what I know - which would be France,
Germany, Spain, Switzerland and a little longer ago now, Mexico. I
confess I don't visit bookstores in countries whose language(s) I don't
read...
Younger US poets? Well I seem to remember seeing them in German and
Swiss journals actually, but right now I could not name names, as I
don't have the journals on my shelves any longer. In Germany there is a
definite openness towards US poetry dating back to the first encounters
with the beats, and later Snyder, Creeley, O'Hara and Ashbery.
Yes there's a process to go through, but I wasn't bemoaning the absence
of younger British poets (and, well, Lavinia Greenlaw is definitely a
younger poet, whatever I may think of her work), I was bemoaning the
absence of ANY British poets, because I acknowledge that until someone
gets hold of, say, Bunting, Graham, Jones, certain others, the rest is
unlikely to follow. I've spoken to a good many French and German poets
about the scene over here - poets who might be expected to be
sympathetic to non-conservative modes of expression: the French know
Tom Raworth & little else, and the Germans know nothing of it at all,
except the late Mr Hughes, Michael Hofmann. Michael Hamburger and
Lavinia G. As I point out there are extenuating circumstances in the
presence of the last three names or of, Sujata Bhatt, who just occurs
to me, and lives in Bremen.
It's quite natural for poets forty-and-under to be outnumbered on the
shelves by their elders, as the latter outnumber them in absolute
terms. My local Waterstones has not a single one in fact ... but then
the still-living and over-40s poets are exactly numerous on their
shelves either.
What I was trying to get across was that intelligent engagement with
the kind of poetry that matters to many of us on this list, by
non-anglophone readers and writers, can only occur if it's available,
and the available channels of opinion in those readers' countries are
encouraged to engage. Alas, the British Council prefers to promote
something else. It would be good if a German editor could do what
Andrew Duncan and I did for a number of German and Austrian poets in
Chicago Review last year - many of those poets under 40, incidentally.
Tony
On Saturday, August 2, 2003, at 03:55 pm, Iain Buccannon wrote:
> On Sat, 2 Aug 2003 15:17:48 +0100, Tony Frazer <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
>> Peter's claim may have been a little all-encompassing, but I don't
>> think he's far off the mark.
>
> "All over the world editors and readers think..." seems to have shrunk
> rather drastically in your account to the bookshops of Germany and
> France."A little all-encompassing" is, I hope, a witty understatement.
> Forty-ish and under poets from the rest of the world are hardly
> represented
> in British bookshops either...this is a problem surely of the slow (and
> sometimes arbitrary) process of translation, selection, and the
> willingness
> of publishing houses - as you seem to acknowledge. Which American
> poets of
> the younger generation are available in other languages? None's my
> guess.
> And anyway it would hardly prove that editors and readers all over the
> world think British poetry is old-fashioned?
> Best,
> Iain
>
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