Yes... it never takes me long to say No to him (e.g: http://www.intercapillaryspace.org/2012/03/mac-lows-diastic-process-in-gale.html ).... but amazedly ... for who else knows as much about all this, who else has really engaged with this range of UK poetry and can talk about it (comprehensibly, for the most part)? And I'm often surprised.
A fantastic (and typically long) new post just showed, BTW, supplemental to the forthcoming book:
http://angelexhaust.blogspot.com/2012/03/long-1950s.html
This book: - having completed his underground history for the moment, it's time for AD to focus on the mainstream. He suggests 6,000 practitioners in the thirty years or so of his coverage. Striking to remember (whatever may be the case in the US, where Silliman has constantly attacked the "School of Quietude" 's claim to represent the unmarked case in US poetry), that in the UK the mainstream was overwhelmingly more populous (and consequently must be conceded to be far richer in imaginative capital) than the comparatively tiny underground scene, for all that WF could knock out publications by the gross. This might have changed since, my impression on the internet is that a very large number of younger writers, maybe even the majority, have experimental affiliations and stylings but it's more of a t-shirt than an ingrained praxis and maybe this changes the relationship between the poles on Duncan's map. But it's still difficult to say, because large areas of the mainstream hinterland (whoops, mixed geographical metaphors) may easily be overlooked because they're entirely uninterested in self-definition or staking out a theoretical poetic.
AD's research line is generally drawn at 1997, around the appearance of the Internet. Is that because thereafter it's no longer sustainable (was it ever?) to pretend to understand UK poetry without theorizing US poetry? Discuss.
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