Jamie, and others,
I have attached chapter 4 of my thesis. I don't expect it of convince
anyone, but it has been requested, so I can but oblige.
On Fri, 28 Aug 2009 14:03:09 +0100, Jamie McKendrick
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>I can sympathize with Pierre's "mounting irritation" with this whole
discussion, though slightly resent his dismissal of it as having "just
opinion" as its "core mode of proposal & response". I've none of his
wide experience of e-fora - but have at times "skimmed through", or
read more carefully, a number of such discussions without ever
bothering to enter the fray. My irritation has only on three prolonged
and time-consuming occasions been vented (twice, as it happens, with
Jeff!) and in each of these cases when I believed a poet or a kind of
poetry was being unjustly treated. Though this may look like a claim for
noble motives, I'm afraid it isn't entirely so - there's also been an
element of unsuppressable annoyance. Whilst I see that there's been a
fair amount of "just instant irritated comeback snapping", this hasn't by
any means been the the only mode of response or counter-response -
Peter's considered posts on French and other poetry, Mark's witty
attempts to elicit some kind of anchoring detail, as just two examples.
The discussion seems to have touched on a number of interesting
areas - maybe superficially - but isn't "instant" in the nature of
conversations which lists in a way are bound to resemble, and even
if "irritated comeback snapping" are likely to be a feature of these
conversations the hope is that something more interesting might
develop from them?
> A few days back I suggested Jeff used his blog to present the (for
many of us) missing bits of the argument. I still think this a good idea -
shorter anyway than having to read entire chapters of someone's
thesis. (Work one might usually expect to be paid for, and like Albert's
and Charles's friends I've a fair amount of carpentry to get through.)
Jeff's reluctance to supply details, I can now see, isn't merely
evasiveness and a whole thesis, as he said, doesn't lend itself
to "sound-bites". It looks, from the summary, as though Chap. 4 might
be the place where some of the answers to the questions about UK
poetry asked here could be found, but as yet that's not on offer. Apart
from various critics, the Movement and Group, and - for Jeff - the
weirdly omnipresent Hobsbaum, I can only see Hughes representing the
UK (Heaney's "passport's green"). Though often descriptive, in ways
that to me at least look untiringly inventive, I can't think of a
less "empiricist" poet than Hughes, and hardly "parochial" in any bad
sense - alongside other foreign poets who have been of importance to
him are Vasko Popa, Janos Pilinszky and Yehuda Amichai. (Among the
Romantics I would have thought Coleridge, far more than Wordsworth,
held sway over his imagination.) Jeff, in this chapter do you consider
any other poets than these as evidence of Wordworth's "supreme"
influence?
> Mark, thanks for those references. I know some of Spicer's poetry,
but not Blazer. Apart from Eliot's engagement with Baudelaire and
Laforgue, Hart Crane's with Rimbaud and others, I can't really see that
much of French Symbolism's impact on the US poetry I've read.
Appearances and references maybe but that doesn't look much different
from the UK. Much later, for instance, Randall Jarrell may translate
Corbiere's haunting 'Rondels pour apres' - but an influence?
>Best wishes
>Jamie
> Jeff,
>
>
> you can't dismiss Deleuze's thinking about empiricism as "just an
opinion," or else anything anybody says or writes can be dismissed
as "just an opinion" & then we're up shitcreek without a paddle.
>
>
> I have skimmed through this whole discussion with mounting
irritation as "just opinion" seems to have been the core mode of
proposal & response. As someone who's been active (well more
voyeuristically these last few years) on a range of e-fora since their
inception, I can say from experience that serious, detailed discussions
& exchanges are rather rare (I remember some excellent ones on the
buffalo poetics list in its early years). I wonder if combining discussions
on the list with more detailed statements (such as those chapters you
proposed we read) on parallel blogs, would be a better way in that it
would lessen the risk of just instant irritated comeback snapping?
>
>
> Pierre
>
>
>
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