It is extremely nice to have you here, Rebecca, the Lady with the most
beautiful Site on the net!
As if "poetryetc..." was mine, please pop in some other times, and with Liz,
it is always interesting to listen to you.
Having quickly read the messages that followed yours, I am with Goeffrey
Gatza and his "write poems". I think some people are luckier than others,
they are simply there at the right time and moment, or write those specific
words when needed by society at large. History has repeatedly shown how many
artists and poets were left without anything while living and were
discovered decades or centuries after their death. We all want to avoid such
a miserable fate, but we know it is not uncommon. I am therefore thankful to
people like Randolph and Alison for this outlet, and like Rebecca and many
others who have hosted me and allow my poems and/or writings to appear. And
again I am with Pierre Lévy and the marvel of the net.
Take care you all, anny
----- Original Message -----
From: "seiferle" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, January 05, 2003 9:00 PM
Subject: British commanders, etc.--reply to Liz
> Liz wrote and asked if anyone else was unfamiliar, or if there were
different points of view concerning Carol Ann Duffy.
>
> So, having lurked, having been on then off the list, then lurking again,
and back again, I thought I would chime in, since I am writing from what
Georgia O'Keeffe called 'the great faraway,' the desert of northwestern
New Mexico, very far from any considerations of who might or might not be
British poetry commander.
>
> I first came across Duffy's work while reading Eavan Boland's Object
Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. I found it an
interesting book in general, and in particular, the last section where
Boland discusses Duffy's "Warming Her Pearls," as well as Louise Gluck's
"Mock Orange," a poem by Keats, and one of Boland's own works, in terms of
the erotic object and how the woman poet must disassemble the traditional
elements of poetry, in order to be the subject where she has been
traditionally object, and so the "erotic object of the traditional love
poem--such as Julia's silks--witnesses the orderly progression of power
between poet and perception (what Boland defines elsewhere as the erotic
being traditionally a drama of expression), the pearls restate the fixed
decorum of that relation by deliberately suggesting a breakdown of power."
>
> Perhaps this is passe to most on the group (and pardon the missing accent,
though truthfully, most where I live would, in saying "passe" forget the
accent altogether and just say it like it looks) but I find it deeply
interesting, and part of the continuing difficulty of being "that emblematic
figure" (to quote Boland again) the woman poet, which still seems to be the
case, as suggested by the degree to which on this list, at least from my
lurking view, women poets often become emblematic figures, representative
of 'all that may be wrong with poetry.'
>
> I haven't kept up with Duffy's work. Most of the time, I have too much to
read and do, but what I have read is interesting, as is the work and speech
of many women poets, for its own merits but also because of the
disassembling of the hierarchial orderings of speech and being involved,
just in order to be able to speak. And so I read her remarks, whatever they
were, as a disassembling of those hierarchial orderings, rather than the
installation of some new poetic order. Her preference for the 'simple' word,
if there is such a thing, seems to be a statement of her own practice,
rather than an advocacy. I am reminded of Hayden Carruth, an American poet,
who similarly prefers the simple word, and who says so forcefully.
>
> Best,
>
> Rebecca
>
> www.thedrunkenboat.com
>
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