Dear Grade 6,
Why not pretend you are Heaney - one more name shouldn't be any bother
for you - then you can try and respond to what Jeffrey said in the
article properly - you know, actually engage with what he is saying
and refute it with a reasoned argument instead of a nonsensical rant?
I am sure if you put on the mask you could do it. What fun we all will
have......
Yours
G.C.E. Eng. Lit Grade C 1968
On 6 Apr 2009, at 23:39, Grade 6 - Anruth wrote:
> Intellectual criticism?
>
> You open your piece by supposition and invention, asking what Heaney
> saying
> the avant garde is an old fashoned term, *really* says about his own
> poetic,
> which has been likened to a Georgian one. From this you waffle into
> a very
> boring read, making up stuff that offers the reader no exciting as a
> piece
> of text.
>
> A picture of what's inside an academics head. But reading Heaney's
> work and
> yours, it is clear that at your age, his wordplay is the most avant
> garde,
> if we take avant garde to be inventive, memorable, different than what
> everyone else is doing and arresting for the readers eye. That is
> part of
> the reason he can sell his books to people other than his pals, and
> why you
> do not.
>
> That is why he can charge 20 a quid a pop to hear him live, and you
> can't
> get thirty punters free of charge.
>
> That is why his audience is the English speaking world, and yours is
> a bunch
> of kids bored as you blather in class.
>
> You pretend this is irrelevant and act like a nob to poets whose
> tradition
> you know zilch of, and a curriculum instinct and love leads them to
> study
> and believe in, and you have nothing but a few twentieth century
> bores with
> nothing but hot air to find faith in.
>
> Heaney's criticism, of all the gear I read, and I read from Pound to
> Bernstein, was the most *poetic*, the overt display of which, you
> seem to
> think has no place in contemporary poetry.
>
> Call me to the wind
> and I will herd the shepherds in.
> And floating leaves that crisp beneath my feet
> will not wake me from my vividness.
>
>
> This is your gear. Apart from the opening line which returns three on
> agoogle in parenthesis check, the rest displays that Georgian poetic
> your so
> against. Cliche makes up the rest: floating leaves, crisp beneath
> the feet.
>
> But you have a great capacity for prentension
>
> You made Pandora visit me
> from her disruptions across
> the sea her mane was
> stretched like Cyprus flow and
> her mind was as smooth as
> causation at a time I had
> reached my most content you
>
> etc etc. A narrator who garbles on with lots of Greek references
> which do
> not give the reader any idea what's going on, just a boring *I*
> attempting
> TO position himself on Parnassus and failing, because he thinks he's
> great
> and everyone else is a lunatic or *appalling* at poetry, as your
> occassional
> rant-blog states, the appalling state of mainstream poetry.
>
> Because I don't agree with you, I haven't read you properly. Well,
> me and
> the rest of the planet.
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