Hey, Rob, Diddly Squat would be a great name for a poetry mag. I can
just see its name in neon now, ah, those bright lights of fame.
Can you imagine the conversations: 'Have you seen my latest in Diddly
Squat?' 'Ah, I thought it definitely an improvement in your previous
in Fuck-All'
See, there's progress!
Best
dave
2008/7/1 Robin Hamilton <[log in to unmask]>:
> It sounds from what you say, Doug, that Canada lies between the US and the
> UK when it comes to rating the actual practice of writing.
>
> And of course there are all kinds of provisos to be made, not just country
> but time and discipline.
>
> The bottom-line proviso, which I paid through highschool and even beyond
> retirement from university teaching was simply time -- time spent writing
> poetry was tiime not spent writing or researching an essay or article.
>
> That was pretty much fair when everyone knew the rules, and you simply
> accepted that you'd probably get a degree at least a class lower than if you
> didn't write poetry. Poets rarely got first-class degrees, though the two
> exceptions I can think of were Stephen Mulrine, and of all unlikely people,
> James Kelman.
>
> I was, in many ways, lucky at Glasgow -- I graduated in 1969, two years
> before the night of the long knives, when the six best undergraduate writers
> were expelled from university in one fell swoop. Among other unnerving
> things, I was surprised at just how *accurate the literary judgement was --
> someone somewhere in the establishment managed to get it exactly right in
> identifying the writers who would in the course of the next five or ten
> years become establisment figures themselves.
>
> So when I'm tempted to compalain, I remind myself that I was never actually
> expelled from a course or a post because I wrote poetry.
>
>> And they are 'peer-reviewed', really, when you figure that it other
>> poets who usually edit these mags, online or off.
>
> But they don't *count as such. Two major -- well, at least long -- pieces
> I published on Edwin Morgan and D.M.Black orginally appeared in _Akros_,
> which as a poetry magazine counted for diddly squat.
>
> Equally, when I finished my PhD (on John Donne and the Tradtion of Platonic
> Philosophy), I knew there were only three people in the world who had a
> spread of expertise to realise what I was doing, and as I'd managed to
> pretty comprehensively insult two of them in the course of my work, they
> were ruled out as possible external examiners, and the only one I had any
> time for, Joe Mazzeo, was in the States and too expensive to fly over for a
> viva.
>
> This later returned to haunt me when I tried to publish my PhD and was
> (quite unofficially) shown a six-page long reader's report not just
> rejecting me but denouncing the work as a tawdry disgrace to scholarship.
>
> I was puzzled as to why the anonymous reader kept on harping about how I was
> nasty to (later, Dame) Helen Gardner without mentioning the pretty-much
> continous attack I'd levelled at A.J.Smith.
>
> My boss at the time happened to be John Lucas, who was tight with Harvester,
> so I asked him if he happened to know who was the reader at Harvester for
> Renaissance works, and he said, "Oh, it's Joe Smith at the moment."
>
> On the other hand, I'm still rather proud that a review I wrote of James
> Kinsley's editon of Dunbar had Kinsley promply insist that Nottingham
> University unsubscribe from any journal that featured me on its pages.
>
> End Rodent Rant
>
--
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
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