Hi Uche,
I'm afraid you would have to look somewhere on the endless archive of
the Brit-po list. I haven't yet posted much to Poetryetc - I'm a very
occasional contributer. Some of the things I've said on this topic
would also be in the Terrible Work archive, which I'm sorry to say is
currently not available.
But surely it is not too difficult to understand how that 60's
opposition between free and formal came about. I lived it of course.
Perhaps it is something that is more understandable to us Brits with
our heavy hang-over of class consciousness. I know that it was
different in other countries. (The U.S. experience was more similar to
ours but the scale and the direction was different.)
Where are you based?
Cheers
Tim A.
On 14 Apr 2010, at 14:17, Uche Ogbuji wrote:
> 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
> Founding Partner, Zepheira http://zepheira.com
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