By the way, presuming you might want to hear a live version of Donne & Monk
together (just teasing) - if you reside in the New York or the far Western
States of America, Geradine Monk, and her equally distinguished poet
husband, are doing a little poetry tour via Idaho, Portland, and the SF Bay
Area. Here are the details:
San Francisco
Tuesday 21st Feb.
7.30 pm.
Moe's Books
2476, Telegraph Ave,
Berkeley
Portland, Oregon.
Sunday 26th Feb.
7.30 pm.
(with Martin Corless-Smith)
'Spare Room',
New American Art Union,
922, S.E. Ankeny
New York
Wednesday 8th March
8.00. pm.
(with Martin Corless-Smith)
'The Poetry Project'
St Mark's Church.
N.Y.
> Thanks for that thoughtful post, George. Nice to see something engaging with
> the actual poem in question.
>
> Dave wrote:
>
>> Not a good idea on Geraldine's part I'd say: in the first place the Donne
>> poem she exploits has no direct connection with what she's writing about, in
>> the second it is not a good idea to extensively quote someone who is so
>> obviously a better writer, the whole thing reads to me like petulant
>> graffitti. What I receive from it, what is transmitted, is Geraldine's
>> desire to be noticed, it is not that I doubt her concerns about the Gulf War
>> (and why she is so freaked out about poor old Hopkins eludes me) but I don't
>> feel that splattering one's ego all over the echoes of history is going to
>> do anything to stop the next murder in Iraq.
>
> I rather disagree with David's comments, which seem to be personal jibes
> rather than about Ms Monk's poetry. It is hard to imagine that any poem will
> "do anything to stop the next murder in Iraq"; I am not sure that can be
> levelled as as a literary accusation, since I can't think of any poem that
> would have that effect, including Donne's; and it seems rather a wilful
> misreading of the poem as naïve political activism, which I don't believe it
> is. Nor does poetry's practical lack of utility seem a good reason not to
> write about the things that concern one in one's time.
>
> Best
>
> A
>
> On 14/2/06 11:25 PM, "George Hunka" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Dave, I found it fairly easily. The navigation is a little unintuitive
>> (it does begin on 4 of 8; Ms. Monk's essay begins on page 1, and the
>> best way to get to that is by reading through the entire poem, which is
>> broken up on those later pages).
>>
>> At least Monk's essay and work explicitly acknowledge the communion and
>> community of souls, though her approach will threaten, in that
>> post-modern spirit, the romantic notion of the Poet as Individual
>> Creator. Well, that notion has never been true--only 250 years ago we
>> had Pope's Iliad and Odyssey, much the same spirit (for how much of Pope
>> is intertwined with Homer there). It was a brave move to go from Hopkins
>> to Donne, one of the most sensual of the Metaphysicals; she draws the
>> accusation of aesthetic necrophilia to her I suppose, but I do think
>> that at least in this case the issue of the mating serves her purpose.
>> Monk explicitly states that her aims are political as much as
>> aesthetic--"Unlike Hopkins whose poems introduced a dichotomy of social
>> and political injustice my Roman Rumourals were a total appropriation of
>> poems by men but reworked and signed by a woman. I liked the fact that
>> they may have disapproved of such a heresy. A form of retribution and
>> redressing from the future but a retribution that is intended to be
>> complimentary towards the work," she writes. I suppose one could argue
>> about the quality of the work (I like this poem a lot myself), but her
>> project, I think, is very supple, and an honest project.
>
>
>
> Alison Croggon
>
> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
> Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
> Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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