Can any of us honestly say that they could categorise any contemporary poem
put in front of them without an author's name attached as "Mainstream" or
"Innovatory"? Some, yes, but ANY? (and you're not allowed to say "It's in
the middle" because that's cheating).
Or likewise say "This poem must be by a woman"
Or "This poem must be by an Irish person"
Or even "This poem must be by an American" except on referential or lexical
grounds.
And until you can do that, I don't see the point of using these as
definitive categories, which as Trevor says get applied externally,
assumptively, and predictively. What uses they do have can only be
political, or for making broad distinctions in a shorthand context subject
to refinement. I'm not of course saying that you can't liken poets to each
other.
Even an apparently "tight" group such as the current new-Cambridge academic
bunch seems to me to hold poets sufficiently distant from each other in
actual practice as to make the category more-or-less meaningless (in spite
of the fact that some of them call it a "community").
In a recent Chicago Review there was a "Map" by Andrew Duncan of modern
British poetry divided into a whole load of categories we never knew existed
(I can't quote them, I used it to light the fire). It excluded most poets.
As soon as you start talking about Mainstream and Innovative you have
immediately excluded from consideration over 50 percent of
possibly-interesting current poetry.
I'd even go so far as to say that the monstrous injustices which go on in
the British poetry sphere in the matter of prizes, honours, sinecures, etc.
probably don't derive from categories, but from pure corruption. It's just
not true that all the winners write "the same kind of poetry" (except of
course when they're all the same person).
I realise that some of this seems to contradict what I've said elsewhere
about the singular distinction of what I called "the original Cambridge
impetus" in the 1960s. But that was strictly historical: it concerned
recognisable features of some poems deriving from specific contact. And it
was laughed out of court anyway.
Peter
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