David,

I suspect you mean me by "head teacher," since you had responded to an earlier discussion on this thread by calling me a "paid professional," and I suspect you mean to insult me or cast aspersions on my remarks by so calling me. I am not so clear why I should shrivel up and die at these remarks? it's more inclined to make me laugh.

I was the one who first responded to your asking what the line was that you were using in your poem and who told you the line and that the song was written by Screamin' Jack Hawkins and the most famous rendition was probably Nina Simone's. As you yourself referenced in a later email, I had written to you months ago most cordially and invited you to send work and a feature on your magazine. Being a paid professional, I am too busy for soap operas, and I have no private history with you or any long standing grudge or association with some UK or Irish literary group that is out to get you. 

My responses to you have been basically of two kinds: 1, a response to your poems and the issues presented in them, 2, more recently, a response to your posts when after Alison posted as clear a request as anyone could make that you stop referring to her personally you have kept doing so. 

As for the first, I don't have to reply to your poems and the issues presented in them, and that I did, being as busy as I am, is itself some reflection of interest. And I have taught and been taught in so many venues that I take for granted a truthful and exacting exchange of response to the work and where no one goes around afterwards for a month nursing some unfavorable response as if it were an unjust grievance or an assault on one's person. I have never seen anyone so moan and groan about a response to a poem, as you have about my response to 'The Cloud.' However since you cannot take anything but praise, I will just no longer reply to your poems, even if there might be things that I might praise in them, for fear of unjustly afflicting you with my honest opinion and because, really, as a paid professional, I expect those who are in a forum for the discussion of poems and poetics to be able to take a negative reading once in a while.

On the second matter, it seems to me to be a matter of conscience to reply to your posts. If I said nothing, I would feel as if I were standing in a room watching one person periodically hassle another while the other kept saying stop, and everyone stood around, and said how boring the argument was, and why can't she stop complaining and let us get on with the lunch. To me it is a matter of principle. I have replied more out of a sense of obligation, than of interest. I think you have acted reprehensibly in this, and I say entirely on my reading of the posts to this list, and I think you are acting reprehensibly now, keeping the issue alive by drawing attention to how much pain it has caused you, basically writhing about for sympathy and as if you were the victim of this. I don't understand why you cannot just stop, and that in and of itself, in its obsessive persistence and recurrence, its indifferent to public spectacle or humiliation, the way you keep dragging your feelings about her into the list, seems to prove entirely Alison's point about your behavior towards her.


Rebecca

Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com


  
-------Original Message-------
From: "david.bircumshaw" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 04/22/03 12:21 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Nina Simone, Jazz Singer, Dies

> 
> 'Head teacher' wasn't you, Alison, wrong again. It is no overstatement that
I felt afraid to say anything about Nina Simone's death as it might be
distorted into meaning something else, that poem of mine 'The Cloud' which
semi-quoted a line from a song of hers was twisted into something it
didn't
mean by both you and Rebecca Seirferle. I do understand you have been
feeling distress, that distress I think unfounded, but I recognise that it
is how you feel. I too am distressed by all this, and you know perfectly
well what my personal situation is, and I ask you to recognise that I have
feelings too. I'm not angry with you but I am at some others who have
tried
to put the boot in, the soap-opera-like attractions are all too evident.
You
and I enjoyed a perfectly innocent friendship for several years which was
mutually supportive and harmless, that you've chosen to end it is your
prerogative and as I've assured you I will only ever write to you, in any
context, in reply to direct address, I certainly don't want to make you
feel
'stalked'. You are certainly not being 'erased', this latest row has come
out of a post of mine that was obviously written with good-humour but it
all
seems to no avail.

I'm fed up with all this stuff, and would much rather talk poetry, and
definitely hear you doing the same.


David Bircumshaw

Leicester, England

Home Page

A Chide's Alphabet

Painting Without Numbers

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----- Original Message -----
From: "Alison Croggon" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, April 22, 2003 12:24 AM
Subject: Re: Nina Simone, Jazz Singer, Dies


At 11:44 PM +0100 4/21/03, david.bircumshaw wrote:
>Yes, Anny, I heard about this, but was afraid to say anything about it on
>this list considering the crazed accusations that have been levelled at
me.
>That is the mental state things here have reduced me to: one of continual
>fear. Every time I log on I tremble at what might come next, it's ok it
>seems for any attack on me to be made but I mustn't protest else head
>teacher will tell me off.

Head teacher here:

what seems crazed to me are your statements that short, private,
impersonal notes from me requesting that you cease a certain practice
are transformed into deceptively seductive invitations for more of
the same.   And your outrage at the front channel request, given that
your responses indicated the backchannel route was clearly useless.
Or maybe it's simply dishonest, like other accounts of yours I have
seen of things which involve my reality.

I do not enjoy being erased so profoundly.  And if you do not
recognise that as a form of "psychological terrorism", especially
when it occurs over a long period, that is your problem, not mine.  I
reject completely that my wish to be free of such harrassment is
bullying.  It is a simple, reasonable request.  I have explicitly
said, which in fact I have every right not to say, that I do not have
any objections to your being a fellow list member if you can bring
yourself to accede to my requests.  You refuse to realise how
tolerant and patient people have been, and how much you have abused
that.

I do think it would be much easier to deal with if I were not a list
owner.  For that reason, I will not have anything to do with any
decision about your future membership.

A
--


Alison Croggon
Editor
Masthead Online
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