Sorry Michael if I'm responding to this first but I'm sat here so I might as well.
"The trouble has been a confusion of novelty and quality" WOW. Now there's a typical Peter Riley type statement. Where in heaven's name do you start to argue with that. The baggage in that statement would take up the luggage compartment of a 707. I suppose it implies that Peter has the ability not to confuse novelty with quality while certain others (maybe me etc) do not have that ability so are taken in etc. Well, I have to disagree Peter, I happen to believe that I have an eye to quality as much as you do - but I look upon such quality as living within a context, within certain borders, an eternally provisional quality if you like, not something that can be fixed by any supposed overview. And I would see novelty in the same light, but as an ingredient, something that either lent itself to the quality of a poem or, yes, lent itself to the failure of a poem. This applies to all poetry, British, American, whatever. If it is the case, and it probably is, that certain young British poets back in the 60's were drawn towards American poetry because of 'novelty' then so be it, if 'novelty' is the word you want to use for that quality of difference that it contained. But there were cultural and generational reasons for that, reasons why some poets found in the American poetry something that was lacking over here, reasons why it spoke to them. To imply that they were just confusing novelty with quality is ridiculously reactionary.
There, I think that that was pretty painless, considering.
And of course avant poets can be as conformist as any of the traditionally orientated ones - but it isn't my fault, any more than yours, if at the moment there seems to be a lack of discrimination in some quarters where conformity to an expected poetic takes precedence over 'quality' .
Cheers
Tim A.
On 1 Oct 2014, at 11:06, Peter Riley wrote:
> The trouble has been a confusion of novelty and quality, as if the one necessarily implies the other. As if only traditionally oriented poets are capable of being conformist.
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> I think we get a partial view of things from here according to our own inclinations. I expressed in an early review the opinion that the us/them division in US poetry was healing and the former rebels are now accepted in wide-focused college teaching and influencing new poets, but Mark Weiss (I think it was he) assured me that the old guard is still as active as ever, teaching histories in which you will learn about Lowell, Berryman, Wilbur and company, and you will not be told about Olson, Dorn, Duncan and the rest. I can't complain about this because I think all those heroes of "modernism" have big problems attached and it is as wrong-headed to ignore Lowell as it is to ignore Spicer. What's mainly sad is that the coverage continues in the form of a division and an antagonism.
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> I, like everyone else, was badly educated in the history of 20th Century poetry, and am still trying to set this right.
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> PR
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> On 30 Sep 2014, at 16:51, [log in to unmask] wrote:
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> Hi Peter,
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> Well I would hesitate to describe US poetry as more admirable than UK poetry, or vice versa. What I envied was not the poetry as such, (that's a different matter), but what I sense as a sort of shared confidence in a directly applied modernist poetic, a lack of poetic hang-ups maybe, something that liberates expression in what seems a direct and non-precious non-self-conscious way; this at least is how it strikes me as as a UK onlooker. I'm aware that I'm proliferating stereotypes and that I could name US poets who make a different impression; but I'm happy that Tim knew exactly what I was talking about. There's probably a grass-is-greener effect. And where the grass is indeed greener there's no doubt a corresponding price to pay. I think that some kinds of poetry only thrive on stony ground.
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> Best,
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> Michael
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