I was there. Guilty as charged. I'm trying to get my head around the
whole thing at the moment and have something germinating on my laptop
that will attempt to place it more securely. It needs a little more
fertiliser, rather more in fact than was thrown at it by the mainstream
on friday.

I too had understood that this was the question to be asked (i.e Is
there An Avant-Garde?), but in fact there were 4 papers given /
presentations made:

Peter Middleton explored the divide between 'mainstream' and 'radical /
innovative / avant-garde' (whatever: choose your favourite term), and
was at pains to point out that, although he was in the radical camp, he
actually read a good deal of work from the other side. He pointed out,
gently, that the mainstream tended to deal viciously with radical work,
dismissing it as having no literary merit (case closed). (This latter
point, after Edna Longley, case for the prosecution, had complained
vociferously that the avant-garde apologists, just looked down on the
mainstream, treated them with contempt, and regarded them as not
intelligent. You can imagine how my heart bled for her.)

Patrick Crotty examined the revival of the fortunes of Devlin, Coffey
and McGreevey and their apparent classification by some as the
forgotten masters of the Irish 1930s. He tried walking a tightrope on
this one, saying how valuable the recovery and republication had been,
but then had to confess that he didn't really like any of the poems —
well, maybe a bit of McGreevey. He found Coffey, in particular,
tin-eared. He did seem to have a preference for sonorous verse (he's
editing MacDiairmid, loves W S Graham, Bunting too), and I've never
actually read Coffey aloud to myself. I shall try this to see if the
criticism has any force.

John Goodby stayed with matters Irish and, at times, Welsh and upset
the more conservative members of the audience with some injudicious
turns of phrase, which left him hostage to fortune, and very much on
the back foot when attacked in similar terms by Peter McDonald. One or
two people present had it in for him anyway after a couple of his books
on Irish poetry.

Peter McDonald made it plain — although he didn't actually say it —
that he held the radicals in contempt; that most modern poetry wasn't
worth the paper it was printed on (but what about his forthcoming
Carcanet volume, I wonder?); that the words 'radical' and
'experimental' were nonsense in connection with poetry, the job of
which was to enshrine memory, in a form of some kind (just what kind,
is not too clear to me), for the benefit of our descendants. Art as
holy duty, and, I suspect, as something that the Oxford academic will
explain from time to time to his stupid, and often mistaken public.

You'll discern from my tone that I found McDonald to be a smug,
supercilious and mostly irritating individual. He made it worse by not
really debating his own *gnomic utterances*, but by allowing that it
really was all a matter of opinion, while at the same time making it
plain that the opinion of others not in accord with his own was beneath
contempt.


I doubt that anyone changed their views as a result of the session, and
I suspect Edna Longley won't be buying my forthcoming Catherine Walsh
volumes (or anything else, for that matter), but there was at times a
robust debate and a polite enough exchange of views. There were a few
too many straw men being erected and then demolished to the cheers of
the mainstream for my liking, and I found it tiresome to have Edna
Longley — a highly intelligent, well-read critic, who also writes well
and, in my view, reads well, albeit within narrow boundaries – say (1)
we, the mainstream, are being put down all the time by you nasty
avant-gardists & sneered at (2) Yeats is unfairly excluded from the
modernist debate (he isn't, and wasn't on this day either - this was in
fact a side-swipe at another critic who wasn't present), & (3) MacNeice
is where it's at, the fount of all future bounty in Ulster etc etc.

This last one was out of place and was a bit puzzling, but I read it as
a defence - where none was necessary, or called for - of the Northern
Irish mainstream, which has repeatedly looked back to MacNeice. Well,
Michael Longley has, and Edna has been the prime critical defender of
this position, which strikes me, more or less, as a recovery of some
neglected history to give credence to the present. Exactly in other
words, what Patrick Crotty was saying about Michael Smith's endeavours
with the Irish 30s modernists. [I am being simplistic here, I know, but
I couldn't resist the comparison.]

 From the floor, Trevor Joyce was insistent on clarifying some of the
fudging that was going on with respect to the history of New Writers'
Press & the 30s recovery, and did a good job of pointing out that form
didn't just mean sonnets and iambic pentameter.


The best bit of the whole session was the night before, in fact,
following the reading, where we all sank far too much Guinness and
talked far too loudly on the back of it. Amazing how convivial the
atmosphere can get when everyone's half-cut. And Ciaran Carson was a
fine host throughout, tiptoing between the two sides with aplomb. And I
hadn't seen his translation of Dante's Inferno (published by Granta,
which also does his prose) until this trip - there's some wonderful
stuff in there. Carson is one of very, very few contemporary
English-language poets who can use rhyme well.

Initial impressions only. More, perhaps, when I've thought it through.

Tony


___________________________________

Tony Frazer
Shearsman Books Ltd
58 Velwell Road
Exeter EX4 4LD
England

Tel / Fax: (+44) (0) 1392-434511

http://www.shearsman.com/
___________________________________
brit

On 6 Apr 2004, at 13:42, david wheatley wrote:

> Was anyone at the public debate at Queen's in Belfast
> over the weekend on 'whether there is an avant-garde'?
> Wasn't that the question? Well, I for one want to know
> the answer.
>
> DW
>