Apologies one and all - that should be "Western culture" instead of
Western Europe *blush* I got caught-up in the surfing metaphor.
Roger
On 4/23/06, Roger Day <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Growing up in the aftermath of the fifties - the sixties barely
> touched the West of England outside of Glastonbury and a few big
> cities - my main experience of poetry was that of church hymn,
> victorian stitched pictures, music lyrics, doggerel, proverbs. Poets
> were ignored, and highly suspect. Whether my experience is typical
> working class, I don't know; my intuition says it's near to the truth.
> In the fifties, certainly in England, such virii as howl was suspect -
> The Movement saw to that. The Movement's legacy is still with us,
> trying to kick Modernism and all that free-thinking pinko-commie
> foreign stuff into touch, out of reach.
>
> Howl, as evinced in a recent article by Michael Schmidt, was a
> consequence of Ginsberg's coming out to his father. It was a happy
> coincidence that the cultural moment in Western Europe was for freedom
> of expression in general. It was a happy tide for Ginsberg, although
> his legacy is being picked and picked at. See most other beat poets
> and writers, few of whom still have a critical reputation worth
> speaking of, most of whom are historical relics already. I see them
> being referenced by people belonging to an older generation, some of
> whom shared that illuminating moment of the late fifties early
> sixties, less by a younger generation.
>
> Still, maybe that's the breaks. Anyway, I think it's outside of
> "poetrys" control whether it matters not. I think it's a matter of
> whether *art* matters or not. If you belong to a generation which
> happens to catch the big kuana of cultural change, the 100 year wave,
> as per the Romantics or the Beats or the Modernists, all of whom
> existed in and around contextual changes and happenings in painting,
> philosophy etc, then you're lucky. Otherwise, all we can do is hang
> around Mavericks or Maui, sex wax our boards, wait for a heavy, a bomb
> or a macker in the right swell window, and hope we can barrel without
> looking like a complete kook. Maybe then you'll be the next Big
> Kahuna. Maybe not. Anyway, fellow dudes, surf on!
>
> Roger
--
http://www.badstep.net/
http://www.cb1poetry.org.uk/
|