DIRT DISHER WORLD EXCLUSIVE - CARNAGE @ THE OXFORD COMA-THON.
Ms B gives a round up of the goss in Oxford and has a moan about Edna the
critic slagging off poets, particularly when Longley was trying to make out
she was against any side taking in poesy vis a vis the usual gangs. The prof
got it for using MacNeice as the prod to maul Jeremy the "theoretical" poet.
Brigley thinks this is just not cricket.
"I don’t understand the lack of tolerance for other factions and group in
poetry."
Zoe declares she is only after poetic unity between all and love to break
out between the bores, but cannot help herself in the face of such perceived
injustice and smoulders a green-eyed flash, hinting at the wildcat within.
"I can only think that it emerges from the difficulties of being published
and poet’s insecurities."
Her passions turn to reporting the wanton attack - from a bemused Rachel
Buxton - on one of the island's most misunderstood men of blather - curly
haired Muldoon, a man whose verbal doodle dooings Zoe tells us she is
willing to cosy up to. But a question still hung above scuffer Buxton in the
ring hoping to outbox a real thing's absent shadow. Is Muldoon the
reincarnation of Joyce or a spacer short of all point or relevance?
"Rachel Buxton of Oxford Brookes University gave a paper on the refrain in
Muldoon’s poetry. She described how in much of Muldoon’s poetry,
particularly Moy Sand and Gravel, a word, line or phrase is repeated to
create a wearying monotony mimetic of tedium."
Smell Zoe's deposit dispatch total ambition and feel a full on bitchiness
smack you from the page.
"The final speaker talked on translations, but he did not have much time and
as he stormed out at the end of the session, I am disinclined to note down
much about his paper here."
~
Mr F couples with Buxton in the orgy, viciously wielding his critical
cricket bat in support of femme noir Rachel.
"Muldoon - I don't get him at all. If anyone here does, I'd like
to know what it is that my tastebuds can't identify."
Will the ruthless Zoe be able to resist such a man of brutal allure oozing
his machine of magnetism? Or is it curtainal doom for them and Rach. Will
the three be as one voice melding its power to moan at the might of bigger
selling minds than their own?
~
But hark! Zoe is shoulder to shoulder with sister in-word Kate Clanchy - who
was moaning about women's bodies being ignored.
"The point of Kate Clanchy’s talk is that the female body is ignored and
sidelined in the interpretation of poems and their reception, something that
her collection Newborn suffered."
Could love founder on the rocks with Tone and Zoe before it's begun? He thinks
"Kate Clanchy may be a bit distressed over the reception of her
motherhood poems by (I assume, mostly male) critics... but in Ms Clanchy's
case I do wonder whether the problem isn't the fact that the poems were
just not very good. I heard her read extensively from that collection last
year, and the poems seemed to be full of very flat observations...most thought
"So what?"
Will his Edward Fox in Day of the Jackal poetry assassin pose give him the
killer wooing skill needed to execute poesy's business?
"....it was the worst reading I heard
all year, barring a couple of Apples-and-Snakes performers, who
somehow found their way onto a poetry bill instead of the Comedy Club."
Or will Ms Z turn away from a Bonnie and Clyde spree? Come down from her
conference high and see sense in the staff room? Will a fight break out over
who’s been stealing tea bags? Will Zoe care?
~
I hope to calm down before dying of under excitement. Everyone is mauling
everyone else - throughout the spectrum - from avants barred for being too
talented to those at the podium purporting to seek unity. Everyone's at it.
~
Much of the true debate - the consensus seems to be - is that the talking in
Oxford was not about intercine mainstream hits on each other or bashing the
Irish, but boiled down to men and women, personae and the feminine "I."
Vicki Bertram suggested
"we should use the terms "male poets" and "female poets".
Some suggesting this concern is dismissed as unworthy of engagement by many
male poets. The dutiful and full reporting Ms B says
"She cites Sarah Maguire who suggests that the "fiction of a desiring I" is
difficult for women and that it contradicts femininity. Wordsworth’s phallic
"I" is not the answer. Neither is the confessional "I" that becomes
distorted. Helen Kidd describes the lyric voice as "the great masculine "I"
while Jo Shapcott thinks of it as "the "I" as Roman numeral."
~
Me me me me me me, it's all about me not you, is the tenor of the Line at a
contemporary poetry conference. A threnody from St Anne's college and at St
Theresa flats in a gathering over nine waves
Dawn fans morph in a mass of electron
as sub particle continuum switch-
code tolling the true mystic
bell, sounds a moan from humanity;
ooohing, aarghing and praying for art
to be ours and no others.
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