Good morning Michael and Peter.
What you say below Michael may be 'proliferating stereotypes' but I think that there is still a lot of evidence supporting them. What I'm not so sure about is how much our distance from it produces that 'grass is greener' feeling you mentioned. A view on this is probably needed from the other side of the Atlantic.
A while back Peter wrote quite a negative review of the 'American Hybrid' anthology but I really enjoyed the majority of the poetry in it, and yes, the material in it could definitely be looked on as an example of 'a sense of shared confidence in a directly modernist poetic' etc. That must be a positive but if there is a slight doubt there it must be a doubt concerning how much that 'shared confidence' is the result not of 'shared confidence in a modernist poetic' but simply an American thing anyway. Yet I don't really think so because, as I think I've said here some time before, there has been quite a lot of post-language American work that I really haven't liked at all - stuff I've called too silky smooth, too preoccupied with showing its credentials of learning and culture, too obviously coming from an academic milieu, far too (and don't laugh) middle class - I think I've even used the word decedent. The American Hybrid anthology thankfully had little that came across to me like that. And then there's the other side of that coin, the hard-edged more emotional and openly rebellious stuff, especially from many of the younger poets - none of that got into the Hybrid anthology. The influence of the Goldsmith/conceptualist thing is evident in both the soft and hard groups.
The story of American influence on Brit innovative poetry has always been a hard one to get straight, probably impossible owing to the individual histories and differences of those who were influenced; but one thing I think I've cottoned on to is that some of the most important influences were quick flashes, something that could be got by reading a single poem. And again, in all the important cases the poetry of those who were influenced never looked American, it looked English. It looked English because it was English, not American.The poetry of the so-called Poetry Revival etc was distinctly English no matter how deep the American (or French or latin-American) influence went. I do though think that over the past 10 years or so it has become harder to distinguish some English and US innovative poetry, probably because of the institutionally academic background that increasingly becomes a factor of both poetries, and because of the internet of course.
Cheers
Tim
On 30 Sep 2014, at 16:51, [log in to unmask] wrote:
> Hi Peter,
>
> 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,
>
> Michael
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