Wyatt is wonderful
He staggers me again and again
It was just that in my teens it was hard to grasp
something happening and i didn't know what it was
i recall someone (that's not v useful) speaking of standing listening to
coltrane over and over trying, as i recall, to work out how and what he
was doing
i'm with you on yeats
don't know about wisdom - i dont deny it but that's not what i took from
it so much as the felicity of the writing technically, that's the only way
i can think of saying it
anyway, enough already
it's been an extraordinary and useful talk based on a rather creaky verse
best
L
On Wed, August 31, 2011 16:36, Douglas Barbour wrote:
> Well, I can think of many far worse than Wyatt to choose, Lawrence.
>
>
> And your replies tell me you do consider anything said, carefully.
>
>
> Besides, as I always told students, quoting another poet, take on;y what
> you can us of what I say, or words to that effect. Comments can be useful
> -- sometimes.
>
>
> Ive been grateful here, for some....
>
>
> I never read a lot of Graves, but at his best he did something very well
> (in what I did read). And there we are: all those 'modernisms' etc: no
> monolith there.... In the modernist classes I took, at that time, it was
> Yeats (as probably for many), & I still go there sometimes (a few months
> before his death, Robert Kroetsch was reading the later Yeats, as he
> said, finding wisdom of old age there, the irony being he was 82, so much
> older than Yeats had been when he wrote those late poems).
>
> Your other side, so to speak, the sound poetry, also no doubt helps, if
> only to get at sounding in the more trad poems (bpNichol always said he
> came back to trad refreshed & more open to play from doing the sounds).
>
> Doug
>
>
>
> On 2011-08-31, at 2:52 AM, Lawrence Upton wrote:
>
>
>> Indeed, indeed, Doug
>>
>>
>> I tend to use a standard line length
>>
>>
>> except when I don't of course
>>
>> but i have never really thought of standard line length as partic trad
>> I
>> am always varying from it to a greater or lesser degree
>>
>> i suppose it is, in some ways... trad, I mean; my reading of what came
>> before modernism saw the tiredness of much that was written rather than
>> the inappropriateness of particular forms
>>
>> and when did the change start -- no let's not go there - i've just been
>> dipping into riding and graves redefining modernism as contemporary,
>> or so it seems as i study through shouts and mobile phones, and it aint
>> the same thing
>>
>> recently i have been rereading of and about robert graves a lot. he was
>> there in my childhood and youth, much as we get some names voxpopped
>> at us now; and there was a documentary on him on tv which had a
>> tremendous effect on me -- i might wonder why now, if i saw it, i was
>> but a teen
>>
>> one thing I remember was his advice to take a poet as a model and
>> really get yourself into that poet, imitating them, the whole bit, hard
>> work, hard work, and that impressed me
>>
>> knowing nothing i went for thomas wyatt, which might be a poor choice.
>> i certainly didn't know enough background but i got a lot out of it;
>> though the white goddess stuff always seemed cobblers
>>
>> so recently i got the latest collected, not the three volumes with all
>> the apparatus because i am unlikely to persist to that degree but a
>> chunky paperback with a fine photo portrait - Brandt I think...
>>
>> and i've been reading
>>
>> *some of it is very good
>>
>>
>> cue peggy lee -- is that all there is?
>>
>> so maybe i too have become adhd / zapping / etc
>>
>> my sensibility has changed perhaps.
>>
>> it's not short attention span as such; but electronic handling of data
>> may have a lot to do with it
>>
>> *
>>
>>
>> i think you're wise re cumulative effects of portraits... they tend to
>> be slight on their own... mine, that is
>>
>> seriously, thanks for your comments: they're always considered, always
>> intelligent... if i dismiss / ignore them sometimes be sure it is not
>> casually
>>
>> let a thousand weeds grow, eh?
>>
>> L
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, August 30, 2011 21:13, Douglas Barbour wrote:
>>
>>> AH, well, Lawrence: many more, eh?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> I can see a series of such 'portraits' as cumulatively interesting, &
>>> more so in the accumulation. My thought on its traf qualities had t
>>> do with the more or less standard line length, & the narrative
>>> quality.
>>>
>>> Also, an innovation for oneself might look not so much so to oner who
>>> sees that as a specific given method.
>>>
>>> When writing a rejection, one should try to be clear & coherent...
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Doug
>>> On 2011-08-30, at 2:06 AM, Lawrence Upton wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> Lots of interesting points here, Doug. Well, points.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I think of everything I do as *being in a tradition(s)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I hadn't thought of this as theatre, but i am content with that.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I write lots of stuff something like this. I have a catch all title
>>>> of _Portraits_, and this could well fit in there. It's more a
>>>> portrait than a snap but I presented is a snap to fit. it's not not
>>>> a snap!
>>>>
>>>> I offered a whole pile of portraits to a very innovative publisher
>>>> a while back and it rejected it because there was, i believe this is
>>>> it, no innovation. I couldn't really tell what the problem was
>>>> because the rejection letter was so incoherent. (I was interested to
>>>> note that a devoted self-proclaimed innovator could not express
>>>> themselves clearly.) There was also, I detected, some embarrassment.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I was already glad because there were a number of really
>>>> infelicitous poems there - together with lots of innovation of a
>>>> quiet kind - and I had regretted submitting it.
>>>>
>>>> I suppose I'm asking questions. The starting point of the poem was
>>>> that first line which was taken unchanged from a posting on another
>>>> list. In
>>>> context it was even more bizarre, and posing.
>>>>
>>>> I don't know the person that well, and demoted them there and then
>>>> on my list of people to get to know. Instead, I set about
>>>> portraiting (There I
>>>> go again using the language innovatively).... portraying,
>>>> speculatively a person who could say such a thing
>>>>
>>>> It was a way of dealing with my anger at the person who had been
>>>> posturing politically
>>>>
>>>> The only snap bit of it, truly, was done with a mouse and cut and
>>>> paste on that first line. The rest was photoshop
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Lawrence
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> Douglas Barbour
>>> [log in to unmask]
>>>
>>> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
>>> http://eclecticruckus.wordpress.com/
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Latest books:
>>> Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
>>> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
>>> Wednesdays'
>>> http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-pres
>>> s_10 .html
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> It is natural to speak of your own weaknesses so winsomely they will
>>> seem strengths, as if everyone else is inadequate if they do not have
>>> your inadequacies.
>>>
>>> William H. Gass
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> -----
>> UNFRAMED GRAPHICS by Lawrence Upton
>> 42 pages; A5 paperback; colour cover
>> Writers Forum 978 1 84254 277 4
>> wfuk.org.uk/blog ----
>> Lawrence Upton
>> Dept of Music
>> Goldsmiths, University of London
>>
>>
>
> Douglas Barbour
> [log in to unmask]
>
> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
> http://eclecticruckus.wordpress.com/
>
>
> Latest books:
> Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
> Wednesdays'
> http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10
> .html
>
>
> It is natural to speak of your own weaknesses so winsomely they will seem
> strengths, as if everyone else is inadequate if they do not have your
> inadequacies.
>
> William H. Gass
>
>
-----
UNFRAMED GRAPHICS by Lawrence Upton
42 pages; A5 paperback; colour cover
Writers Forum 978 1 84254 277 4
wfuk.org.uk/blog
----
Lawrence Upton
Dept of Music
Goldsmiths, University of London
|