Rebecca,

I hope I don't have to say, incidentally, that there's a lot of recent U.S.
poetry I greatly admire and love. To cite just one example, I'd hate to be
without Armand Schwerner's work, and not just The Tablets, but also the
Shorter Poems which Mark's Junction Press produced so handsomely. Though
they sprawl across many cultures and traditions, they always tighten back
into their own characteristic formations, which have an energy and a
generosity of response which strikes me as central to U.S. poetry
functioning at its best. Yes, I know he spent his first ten years or so in
Antwerp; to me he's unmistakably transatlantic.

But in other U.S. poets I like and admire, the strengths that appeal to me
often arrive through a playing of American modes and registers against more
European ones. Maybe my best example here is Susan Howe, who very
consciously explores both American and Irish terrains. For me, her handling
of each gathers a special force and intensity through a background presence
of the other; a sense of significant parallels, historical, religious,
linguistic.

So, a digression (as if the preceding weren't): are there equivalent
tensions and intensities operating in the work of other first or
second-generation immigrants? (Would I be way off in suspecting similar
structures of energies at work in Vallejo? I recall your dealing with the
residues of his Native American linguistic inheritance in his
Sapanish-language writing; are these torqued further when he goes to Europe
- or are the tensions unwound there?) Conclusion of that particular dogleg.

It's not just an idling curiosity that raises these questions for me. I'll
match your boredom with most current British and Irish poetry and raise you.
And one major problem (it seems to me) in both is their ignorance of what's
happening (or happened over the last hundred years) elsewhere: a complacent
security in the local (pub included). I'd argue that this is a great period
for Irish poetry, but not because of the names most readers, Irish and
others, are likely to see touted. The little current Irish verse I read can
be mapped through the Wild Honey site, and it might help break through that
insularity you talk about: Randolph's own work, Maurice Scully, Catherine
Walsh, Geoffrey Squires - and that's only in terms of new work produced, I
believe, in the last three years; there's plenty more before that. I haven't
seen more of Mairead Byrne's work than is on the website, but that's enough
for me to have her book on my list to buy as soon as my postal order
arrives. David Lloyd, also in the U.S. is another worth checking out, though
I just wish he'd write more. I'm probably forgetting names here . . .

As an appendix to that list I'd add (with more or less coat-trailing) Fanny
and Susan Howe, Tom Raworth, Susan Schultz, Barry MacSweeney, Maggie
O'Sullivan . . . and cris cheek if I can get away with it. Yes, they're
American or British poets, but they're also, in real senses, irish.

(Would any of this make more, or more interesting, sense against a
background of Bakhtin's or Martin Bernal[his father was from Tipperary]'s
suggestion of the productivity of sites of meeting and transit?)

Anyway, you can hear most of the above-mentioned luminaries at this year's
Cork Poetry Festival June 20-22. Only a few tickets left, now, ladies and
gents! End of commercial.

Now, where was I?

Marooned in the high sierras?

Not to trivialize, but to meet Mark's exemplary anecdotes with one of my
own, however down-market by comparison: one time, when chatting about
translations, an old drinking buddy, who happened also to be a German
speaker, began to fulminate against the Spender / Leishman version of the
Duino Elegies. After a little probing, it turned out his detestation started
and ended with the opening "Who if I cried would hear me among the angelic
orders?" (From memory) Since I'd always quite liked that beginning, I probed
further, and was met with the incontrovertible datum that, having misspent
too much of his youth, he couldn't get out of his head the picture of
half-pissed angels hailing barmen with yells of "two whiskeys and three more
pints of Guinness in the corner here, and a packet of crisps". The
conversation moved to other matters.

Okay, Rebecca, I can't argue with the specific semantic field the word has
for yourself and Mark - and I don't doubt that it's more generally shared
than the one in my yarn. I've learned that as a fact, and been forced to
consider the implications over the last few days. I wasn't applying soft
soap in saying I've learned a lot from the recent exchange - I have.
Nonetheless, I look at a poem almost two millennia old, and I consider your
being put off by a specific word in my working of it. I see from the OED
entry I quoted that my sense of its meaning is quite valid; as I suggested
when quoting the OED, I'm certainly *not* "in the wrong continent". I'm
still mulling over the sequence as I bring more of it over into English, but
I lean towards keeping "sierras". I know that for you and Mark, the
Englished sequence, if you ever read it, will always have that one bum note,
at very least, but, hell, I'm never going to be able to write in your accent
anyway, with fluency in your usages; they're local and vivid to you. The
language I'm writing in is local to me in the streets and shops everyday,
but it also bears its history within it; the aura it has for you is part of
that history, but, with respect, no more than a part. Spain, Azerbaijan,
England and Ireland have their parts too.

See why I could never even attempt to translate Vallejo?

Best,

Trevor

----------
>From: Rebecca Seiferle <[log in to unmask]>

> That's interesting, Trevor, I think there is a great difference
> between the poetry of what can be called American and European
> English. Though the terms could probably themselves be subjected
> to endless refinement, I think they serve as general markers. I
> remember a conversation with a director of one of the best poetry
> centers here in the U.S., a center that receives almost all poetry
> collections and translations into English from all over the world,
> and the conversation turned to poetry from the U.K. and the director
> explained that she felt that it seemed old-fashioned, vague,
> not very interesting. And then there's your remark to the effect
> that much poetry in the U.S. is bland and garrulous. At the AWP
> conference, I made a remark to the effect that there seems to be
> a kind of poetry being universally written except in the U.S., that
> perhaps we were an island in that sense, surrounded by a very
> different current. So, yes, I do think there is a great difference,
> so much so that I don't know when in conversation someone here last mentioned
> a writer from the UK or Australia that they were reading with
> enthusiasm. Heaney, perhaps, a decade ago, Larkin, also a decade
> ago, but no one lately. I don't know if it's an absence of reading
> or a lack of interest that carries beyond the reading. I have to
> say that I wonder at what seems to be the dominant mode of
> writing poetry in both realms, though they are very different. On
> the other hand, as far as the comments about your translation,
> both Mark and I translate from the Spanish and live or spend
> good portions of time in the Southwest, which is another sort
> of difference and not really connected to the difference between
> American and European English, so much as it is connected to the
> West, Mexico, and Spanish culture and language which goes back
> to the 16th century, so the sense of the word "sierra" which
> would never seem like the mere word of a dead language, no matter
> what Beckett might say!
>
> Best,
>
> R
>
> Rebecca Seiferle
> www.thedrunkenboat.com
>
>
>
>   -------Original Message-------
> From: Trevor Joyce <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: 04/20/03 12:35 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: another working
>
>>
>> Not dismayed, Rebecca - slowed down and made to rethink a little,
> though,but that's not necessarily a bad thing. And I am a bit startled, not so
> much
> by the differences revealed between (what I'll call, very crudely)
> American
> and European English, but by how much I've been taking for granted in that
> regard. And, yes, I'm never slow to infer a positive, but it's good to
> have
> your confirmation of it.
>
> Best,
>
> T
>
> ----------
>>From: Rebecca Seiferle <[log in to unmask]>
>>To: [log in to unmask]
>>Subject: Re: another working
>>Date: Sun, Apr 20, 2003, 7:45 pm
>>
>
>> Thanks for the OED excerpt, Trevor. I hope you're not dismayed by the
>> amount of attention given to a single word, that is sort of the
>> translator's mode, I think. And perhaps I should say too that I don't
>> usually think or reply at such length unless the work is of compelling
>> interest and merit.
>>
>