<<
Robin,
If you want to read the Armitage poem you just have to press the link in the
first post, as the rest of us presumably did.
>>

            [sigh]

I'm not sure just what you *could say that would more clearly demonstrate 
that you seem to have entirely missed the point of much of what is at issue 
in this thread.

Among other things, we're dealing with a situation of information overload.

You are quite correct in that I could simply push the link and get back to 
Jeffrey Side's original article (if I could get back to *that through the 
depths of emails that have encrusted over it, and probably do a few or so 
other things like checking out what else of Armitage's work is available on 
the Web and get some sort of context over what youall seem to be tussling 
over here).

Alternatively, I could simply drop the whole business and get back to doing 
something slightly more productive, tracking down how an alarmingly large 
swatch of misinformation about Scottish Traveller's speech and the presence 
of Harman-derived cant terms in contemporary Scottish traveller's songs 
derives from two songs sung by Davie Stewart, "the Old Galoot", to Hamish 
Henderson in the middle-fifties and early sixties.

Which was what I was doing when dave's poem happened to catch my eye.  And 
from that got sucked into this entire tranche of silliness.

<<
If you prefer your role of lordly adjudicator ("I rest my case, m'lud, and 
will
leave bothering with Armitage for another day"), well, frankly, who cares?
Jamie
>>

I'm terribly sorry about this, Jamie -- I hadn't realised that BritishPoetry 
had been declared an irony-free zone.  Silly me.

Robin

*********************************


On Tue, 16 Feb 2010 18:23:28 -0500, Robin Hamilton
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

><<
> "How's that?"
>I'd say it did quite well on the nastiness scale.
>Though it doesn't distinguish itself from 20,000 other bits of "criticism"
>posted every day that cost nothing to write.
>Jamie
>>>
>
>Um, Jamie, I hate to point this out to you, but both dave ("a dropped slab
>of the realist novel") and Mark ("Most are skillful and nothing more. Most
>take no risks whatsoever.") made *specific points about the Armitage poem,
>whether these points were correct or not, whereas you ...
>
>You told us you liked it.
>
>Slam, bam, thank you ma'am.
>
>I rest my case, m'lud, and will leave bothering with Armitage for another
>day.
>
>If even Armitage's defenders can't think of any *particular reason to read
>him, other than the trust-my-judgement card, well ...
>
>Robin