Alison,
I wouldn't say that Prynne is a special case, though many might
disagree. He has become a kind of cipher though.
What does become noticeable in such lists as this (and yes, we could
all do our own such list) is that the poets in it are all so
different, and some, we know, are out on the edge, and would probably
be whatever the composition of the centre - but others are not. On the
surface there seems to be no reason whatsoever for their poetry being
marginalized - Harwood and Oliver are two obvious candidates. However,
one of the weird things about the poetry that came out of the so-
called British Poetry Revival was the way that so much of it just got
better and better and better - so some of the poets classed as being
marginal, by the centre, ended up by writing stuff of such quality
that that quality had to be also marginalized and ignored, by the
centre. Because it came out of an entirely different poetics it could
not be recognized for what it was, is - the contradiction was just too
much. It's a vicious circle of course, we know that. Over the past ten
years the vicious circle has been squeezed into all kinds of weird
shapes - by support from America, by the Universities, by the web (and
lists like this were Jamie can talk to Sean Bonney), by the effort
that Salt were making a few years back, by the coming out of Prynne's
big book by bloodaxe etc, by the young (unaware of this malarky) - but
the vicious circle still holds.
Conscious attempts to break the vicious circle have always failed.
Even amnesia doesn't work.
Tim A.
On 30 Aug 2009, at 04:33, Alison Croggon wrote:
> It seems to me pretty unarguable that a lot of interesting
> poetry, or at least, poetry that I find deeply interesting, has been
> marginalised in English poetry culture, to the detriment of that
> culture's diversity: not just Prynne, who is maybe a special case, but
> people like Lee Harwood or Doug Oliver or Geraldine Monk or Maggie
> O'Sullivan or Barry MacSweeney or Bob Cobbing (make your own list: but
> even in this random and far from comprehensive listing, it's clear
> we're talking about very different kinds of poets).
|