I knew this morning that I was too tired to put things well.

I do agree that Perloff's way of looking at things is too one-sided. I
particularly distrust her seeming belief that poetry belongs to
'specialists' for validation.

We went to watch a re-showing of an old Wim Wenders' film tonight -
'The State of Things' - the one where the avant-garde film-maker
discovers in the end that his project was financed by laundered money.

While I learnt today that in 1997 the late Ted Hughes (Poet by Royal
Appointment) sold his own archives (all 2 and half tons of them) to
the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.
The purchase for the acquisition came from a bequest of Coca-Cola
shares.

It's the real thing. Laughter, that is.


On 17/04/2008, Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Bircumshaw"
> <[log in to unmask]>
>  To: <[log in to unmask]>
>  Sent: Thursday, April 17, 2008 5:59 AM
>  Subject: Re: New Marjorie Perloff interview at The Argotist Online
>
>
>
>  It's very interesting, Jeffrey, good interview, and thanks for the link.
>
>  I have one or two areas of unease, or ponderous pondering, clumping
>  about with tired heavy feet among the tracts all these wearying
>  forever-present 'issues', as it were:
>
>  a) I receive an impression that poetry reviewing really ought to be in
>  the hands of 'experts'. Comparisons are made with the reviewing of art
>  and architecture. It comes to my thoughts that architecture is a
>  specialism that more often displays disregard for its victims than
>  not,  the comparison is not a happy one. The major architecture
>  practices are inarguably high-end capitalist affairs disassociated
>  from locality and community, and their work shows that.
>
>  b) she clearly doesn't love those mainstream British types she
>  mentions like Glyn Maxwell and Clive James (she calls him British,
>  btw, formerly Aussie, for anyone who hasn't read the article). Now I
>  don't go with that kind of middle-class conformity in poetry they seem
>  to represent either (I'm tired here so I'll be informal) but I think
>  that what really happens is that  they speak for a kind of British
>  mild cultural nationalism that focuses on inherited tradition whereas
>  she argues for a form of experimentalism that is seemingly
>  international but underneath nationalistically US American. It's a
>  problem of two strong national cultures having to co-habit within the
>  same language. The nationalism of the Brits mainly takes a mildly
>  conservative and resistant form: the US is now by far the more
>  populous, economically powerful and expansive. The US is more overtly
>  religious than the UK, but its  real religion +is+ America (meaning
>  USA equals the continent) and that religion is global in ambition and
>  deeply nationalistic in its capitalist drive. The domination of other
>  cultures is very expressly part of that (US politicians make no secret
>  of the role of Hollywood in that) What happened to some extent in
>  English language poetry was that the avant-garde movements were to
>  some extent linked to a need to find distinctively American forms of
>  literary speech, which is fine, but a problem if you're not American.
>  Even worse if you're not American nor middle-class but English because
>  the English poetic tradition is of course overwhelming based on class.
>  Irish poets, for example, can at least still define themselves against
>  being English and in a nationalistic way without being perceived as
>  resistant to innovative writing because the nationalistic agenda of
>  control is between the two most populous countries. England becomes
>  Britain in this area ( so Scots or Welsh writers who no longer define
>  themselves against Englishness, like Duffy, become 'Brits' that is
>  Anglophone extension of the English).
>  So it's a quarrel between siblings (US nationalism, British
>  nationalism) over possession of the family silver. For those of us who
>  are dispossessed tenants on the estate, it's no use neither.
>
>
>  This seems to be saying that the international spread of the langpo style
> is an effect of American capitalism.  More, that American cultural
> imperialism operates the same way as American economic imperialism.  Both
> propositions are dubious.  Messerli puts out an anthology of Brazilian
> langpos.  Are those poets an upscale equivalent of illegal immigrants
> seeking work in the US?  Were they, or their counterparts elsewhere, under
> any *compulsion to write that way?
>
>  What depresses me about the Perloff interview, and Perloff generally, is
> her absolute ideological faith that there is only ONE WAY FORWARD for
> poetry. Her "academically trained specialists" who alone should review
> poetry are people who support that way.  She would count a reviewer as
> "ignorant," no matter how much h/s had studied langpo's rationalizations, as
> long as he disagreed with them.
>
>  While I'm at it: Glyn Maxwell wrote one of the few good long narrative
> poems of recent years, Time's Fool.  Reading it or his perceptive and
> compassionate lyrics is, for me, reading poetry.  Reading Raworth or Prynne
> is something else - a strained, unrewarding, uninvolving, and tedious
> exercise.  I suppose that makes me middle-class and conformist, though as an
> American cultural imperialist I guess I can't also be a cozy Little-England
> type.
>


-- 
David Bircumshaw
Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk