Bloomin' 'eck Dave, Great God of Salt! And you my Lord of Vinegar.
You don't think the Web has changed anything for poetry? You don't think
there's anything new in the world? It's all been done before.
It was all really happening when those few white blokes were doing it all?
I'm sure you're right. That was the real thing. No one else could innovate,
is that right? Must be. Let's keep women, race and sexuality out of this.
Get 'em back into their small places. That must be right.
Love
C
> From: "David Bircumshaw" <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Mon, 8 May 2006 01:56:47 +0100
> To: "Chris Hamilton-Emery" <[log in to unmask]>,
> <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: Modernism
>
> I'm sorry Chris but I think your description of seminal moments still
> happening is a pile of re-cycled cliche.Difficulties in narrative certainly
> exist, but they are tongue-tied by the very managerial language that talks
> of 'historicising'.
>
> Boss-talk, ownership, control, it comes, it swathes, it breathes heavy over
> from the left and the right, whatever they are, the politics of empty
> gesture that infects our world is replicated in its poetic culture, O Thou
> Great God of Salt.
>
> There is a small place, in a frightened corner, where something else
> happens, waiting, squeaking
>
> Amor Vincit Omnia
>
> Dave
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Chris Hamilton-Emery" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Sunday, May 07, 2006 9:01 PM
> Subject: Re: Modernism
>
>
>> Hi Roger,
>>
>> I think those seminal moments are still happening, for example in black
> and
>> Asian writing and in the writing of indigenous peoples. There are just
>> explosive levels of hybridisation as the Web reveals ourselves to
> ourselves,
>> and digital poetics is still a virgin territory. The difficulty lies in
>> narrating and historicising these events.
>>
>> I think there is profound nostalgia for the singularity and transparency
> of
>> early modernism. When there were fewer people, less information, more
>> control on the historicising of events. Hard to narrate a history of
>> modernism now, when we have massive cultural simultaneity, and that
>> synchronous practice lacks any shared context.
>>
>> The democratisation of the arts via the Web has simply made us aware of
> the
>> breadth and diversity of contemporary practice. Forty million poets
>> innovating from Jawa Barat to Katsina?
>>
>> I think the nostalgia, which I certainly would argue exists, is for these
>> old "colonial" narratives, where some writers and writing mattered more
> than
>> others.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> That last phrase was bad. Of course, you can break the pentameter
>>> again and again. You cannot repeat Pounds seminal action. Maybe it's
>>> yearning for moments like that, when your action is primal, new, and
>>> you know it may have large consequnces.
>>>
>>> Roger
>
>
>
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