Tim,
OK, I've certainly never been personally connected to the poetry scene (to
use a very unsatisfactory term) in either the US or the UK. I had always
assumed that these were just shrill accusations leveled by one side against
the other. I's rather bewildering to hear that there might have been
substance to these accusations. It's very hard to understand why there
would be any such correlation, and so I'm still left assuming that it must
have been a forced correlation, if not in post-facto prejudice, as I'd
assumed, then in some aspect of the education and publication of poets,
which is even more tragic. At least I'm glad to hear that this didn't last
long in its purest form, but bad ideology has damaging echoes, and I imagine
those are the echoes I sense in my present observations. I guess I should
take my stick of dynamite on board a time machine to the recent past.
I haven't been on this list long. Can you re-post your article, or pointers
to the list archives? I tried Googling with no success (e.g. '"tim allen"
ideology "free verse" progressive').
Thanks.
--Uche
On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 4:03 AM, Tim Allen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> The trouble is Uche, it's not rot, not historically. Of course it wasn't
> the case that everyone who wrote free verse was hippy or leftist or whatever
> and everyone who wrote iambic was conservative - but it was the case,
> particularly here in the UK, that behind the conscious choice of writing one
> way or the other lay that same nexus of belief and life-style that lent
> itself to political leanings and ideological gestures. The perception that
> free verse was, by its very name and nature, linked to ideas of freedom and
> an example of that freedom in action, was common. So too was the notion of
> form as being conservative, anal, fussy, stuck in the past, concerned with
> outmoded ways of thinking, anti progress, anti free etc.
>
> That moment lasted in its pure black and white state for a very limited
> period - it soon morphed and became a lot more complex - but in many
> peoples' minds the opposition continued and even now you can pick it up in a
> section of the rump of surviving small-press magazines etc. If anything the
> idea lasted a lot longer in the States than it did in the UK - it became one
> of the main street-level oppositions to the poetry of the avant garde
> formalists and intellectuals.
>
> I have written before concerning the subtle shift in the ideology of free
> verse from progressive to reactionary that has taken place over the past 30
> years.
>
> Tim A.
>
> On 13 Apr 2010, at 23:32, Uche Ogbuji wrote:
>
> Sometimes a fool is just a fool. People who think that poetic form has
>> some
>> bearing on politics infuriate me. I have no idea how the prejudice came
>> about that hippies write in free verse and that Reaganite-Thatcherites
>> write
>> in form, but I'd love to take a stick of dynamite to that rot.
>>
>
--
Uche Ogbuji http://uche.ogbuji.net
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