Thank you Lawrence, for your questions about the semantic content of my
recent email.  (see below).  I agree with you, it is important, and I am
honoured to want to know what I mean by accessible.

However, I am not anymore an expert on these matters than you, or many of
the other members of this list.  Indeed, I struggle with new ways of
describing what I read and write often, and try to find the most honest and
open ways of receiving new works, regardless of their remit or origin(s).

Many words used in emails are clichés, and I resist your urge to apply the
same rigorous need for clarity and precise definition to an email about Nine
Inch Nails as to a dissertation.  Nor is "beat" or "street" really any more
a blurb or marketing term than "innovative" or "avant-garde" or "mainstream"
or, for that matter, "poetry" itself.

Beat is a school of writing which is and was widely influential, and you
know it well.  Street poetry is a term sometimes used in Canada (if not
elsewhere) to cover urban - often spoken word oriented - poetry, which
relates to issues that touch on the same sort of concerns that, for
instance, might be broached in rap or hip-hop material; I am being vague to
avoid more cliché here.

I don't think anything is "more authentic" than "what happens elsewhere" -
what poet does?  Poetry is, if nothing else, the validation of the
"elsewhere" and returning it to a happening "here" - in text or other
inscription.  However, some avant-garde poets (Christian Bok for example)
often scorn experience, and reference to a self or emotions, as being
unsuitable elements for poetic progress.  In this context, and it is a
widely raging debate, at least in Canada, I advocate (as apparently Mr.
Joyce does) the possibility that experience and experiment can fuse well.

*

Finally, when I say accessible, I mean: written in such a way that anyone
with a highschool education can understand 90% of the words; or find the
others in a paperback dictionary.  That the way the words relate to a theme,
or an issue, is not entirely remote from "everyday" life - and that, while
tropes are employed, they are not beyond being interpreted - at least by
anyone as willing to dig as they would for a puzzle.  I do not say this is
the only or best way to write poetry.  However, it is one way, and we all
know what it is when we hear or see it: its spectrum begins with greeting
cards, moves to nursery rhymes, to doggerel to light verse, up to and
including Larkin and Armitage. This accessible spectrum comprises 99% of
what the general reading public, and mainstream publishing, thinks of when
they say "poetry".  It contains most of the best, and "best-loved" (this is
a cliché) poems in English - and is in need of expansion and renewal.

I personally believe the spectrum of "accessible" contains stations along
the way (Simic for instance) which are surreal, witty and rewarding.
Whitman is magnificent, and D.H. Lawrence equally important.  We need
political work like Auden's.  I love much poetry which is accessible.

The Cantos by Pound, is not in the category of "accessible" and is just as,
if not more, valid a way of writing poetry.

I simply resent when poets consider anything that appears to be written in
free-verse with non-scientific jargon, and mentions emotion, or experience,
to be "accessible" and therefore uninteresting.

I also think that form and language have their powers exaggerated - content
is very important (not least of in terms of ideology) - and the
truth-telling role of poetry can be obscured by experiments too far from the
vernacular.  I like the Italian Futurist avant-garde's interest in new
developments in things.  I like image.  I like story.  I like the world.  I
want to have this in poems.  In new ways, of course (as well as old).

But Lawrence, if you are seeking an enemy, look elsewhere.  I am a very
open-minded supported of many poets and poetries, and have dedicated my life
to editing and writing it.  I want to discover more poetry, not less.  So I
keep my eyes and ears - and definitions - open.

best

Todd


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lawrence Upton" <[log in to unmask]>
To: "Todd Swift" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, October 03, 2003 9:08 PM
Subject: Re: Cash and the accessible in UK non-conservative poetry


> Todd
>
> I live a somewhat sheltered life and have not, to my knowledge, come
across
> the phrase _Beat-to-Street_ before; but my gut feeling, before I've
thought
> about it, is that it sounds like an advertising or PR concoction - _slam
in
> the lamb_ for instance, or (another food one) _packet_to_plate_
>
> >From your description, it seems to do an injustice to or to misconstrue
Beat
> Poetry, if that is the _beat_ it refers to... and I have always doubted
the
> concept of what happens on the street as being somehow more authentic than
> what happens elsewhere. I am willing to be persuaded on either or both.
>
> Strong content, you say. Strong in this sense, usually means either what
are
> commonly called four letter words used aggressively or lovingly although
the
> two may well be in contradiction... or any other way. When a radio
announcer
> says _The next programme contains strong language_ one has little idea
what
> will follow beyond access to a vocabulary considered by some to be
impolite.
> In its origin, it is a phrase which comes from the withdrawing room rather
> than the street
>
> You go on to say that it is raw and visceral, two words that are widely
> used, linked, in such contexts; and, because of such over use, now mean as
> much as _modern_ and many other words used for connotation in defiance of
> their central denotation
>
> But you go further, saying "speaking of experience"... Do you suggest that
> other forms of poetry do not speak of experience?
>
> What kind of poetry could not speak of experience?
>
> About a month ago, I asked you - when you used the word - to define
> "accessibility". You declined.
>
> You clearly know what you mean because you refer to _language that can -
> however well-wrought - reach a general audience with its searing
> accessibility._ To differentiate qualities like that means that you have a
> grasp of your own terminology. And you are able to use it with
> qualification:"searing accessibility".
>
> It sounds to me as if you are suggesting that anything which doesn't
express
> itself primarily denotatively about drugs and sex is inaccessible to a
mass
> audience, which is surely to underestimate the many and / or patronise
them.
> (On the other hand, addressing them in the broken language of marketing
and
> florid journalism - _searing_ when you probably mean _very_ for instance -
> because that's what they're usdeful, helps to deny them the possibility of
> other modes of expression by maintaining their diet of packet to plate
pap)
>
> So, please, what do you mean by accessible? It is an important point.
>
> Thanks
>
>
> L
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Todd Swift
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Sent: Friday, October 03, 2003 10:50 AM
> Subject: Cash and the accessible in UK non-conservative poetry
>
> I am interested in why this particular "daemonic" (I mean this in a good
> sense) example of pure alternative rock lyricism is being singled out for
> celebration on this list, when, from what I can see, the British
> "linguistically innovative" community has tended to side-line two elements
> far more active in one side of the North American avant-garde (that is,
the
> Beat-to-Street work which emerges as performance and rap in the 90s and
junk
> or punk poetry): namely, a) strong content - raw, visceral and speaking of
> experience, often with narcotics or sexuality as a margin to be pierced;
and
> b) language that can - however well-wrought - reach a general audience
with
> its searing accessibility.
>
> I like NIN.  However, the songs of Interpol or Queens of the Stone Age,
for
> instance, are equally of cultural resonance. Is this becoming a fan site?
> Before you pooh-pooh my apparent cynicism, consider this: what inverse
> snobbery allows innovative poets who eschew the narrative and the
> romantic-self in favour of formal constraints and post-modern
> experimentation, to praise a Johnny Cash Cover of a Trent Reznor song,
when,
> for instance, work of New York alt-poet-rock stars like Nicole Blackman or
> for that matter, Rollins, barely get a look-in here.  My first book,
> Budavox, for instance, explores the themes of post-Burroughs, through the
> prism of alternative wounded youth (one eye on Smashing Pumpkins/Nirvana,
> the other on Bataille); in some circles, it is seen as "experimental" -
but
> not, I gather, in the UK, where splits between page and stage often blur
and
> divide what is a continuum of interests - the underground and the
> non-commercial.
>
> Indeed, I welcome talk of popular underground (the oxymoron is
intentional)
> recording artists.  And film-makers; and conceptual artists, and comix
> creators.  This sort of cross-cultural exploration seems lacking in some
> circles.  But let us recall that JC's most powerful work, Ring of Fire, is
> both lucid and accessible: the power derives from that sort of haunted
> evangelical democratic glory singed by temptation, which is in one of the
> American veins.  Perhaps UK language poetry should mainline some more of
> that creative brimstone and reach a wider audience for its works, by
> exploring the place where stage and sage meet.
>
> best regards
>
> Todd
>