One poet who has disappeared from my own generation is Paul Brown. He wrote
some sharp stuff and also helped co-publish a first book by Ian Davidson
and myself (among many other things, including Tom Raworth) in his Actual
Size imprint.
Day's damp has shuffled bent of back into the
cortex. Pour another High'n'Dry on
ice and tonic it. Slice the lemon like
a party hack. Knife run on surfaces
Each leaves each no more than hinting. The ice
at the bottom of the tumbler. There should
have been a something, never sure what. There
where the lemon's sucked the gin out of us.
(from De Rebus, in The New British Poetry, Paladin 1988)
If you believe we can totally rely on the opinions of helpful elders (or
contemporaries or the next generation)to tell us what's good and how to
like it, you might like to recall Wordsworth's comment om Shelley's
Alastor: "There is not a line of poetry in it." Which at least makes
reading a journey of discovery.
On Kenneth Koch: his I Never Told Anybody: Teaching Poetry in a Nursing
Home is a unique and valuable book on poetry, all about taking down the
last words of elderly working-class people, that has little to do with
where we might place him or what we might enjoy in his own work.
As for things that last for centuries - a few John Clare poems soon set off
my group of working-class pensioners to produce some Clare-like poems of
their own about insects, wagtails etc. People were so very right to admire
his directness and vividness of perception and expression: one of those
readers who wore out that pub copy of The Seasons.
Assez!
John
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