Hi Robert,
No, of course we all have our own preferences and they don't need to be
preclusive. By orthodoxy I'm indicating the overlap between the Duncan and
Mellors quotes I gave, and the Brady and Patterson quotes, and a great deal
more that could easily be referenced, as well as this more originating one
by Olson.
I don't think I was mixing up personal anecdotalism with biographical
criticism so much as mixing it in, but also signalling that a great deal of
personal incident, say, in Yeats's life surfaces unashamedly in his poems.
Turning a young woman he knew into gazelle, or was that a gazebo - not my
joke, is certainly transformation but for all he said about the poet not
being the figure who sits down at the breakfast table he doesn't appear to
have been inclined to spurn the incidents in his life, such as an anecdote
about a school visit, as being unfit for poetry. I'm not so happy about
Plath and Berryman, or even Lowell for that matter, being tagged as
"confessional" but the label's been stuck on with superglue.
I've prematurely aged in the last few years - I blame this list - so I'm
catching up fast. But still, the teaching you had of Eliot, Yeats and
Stevens doesn't quite seem to bear out your earlier point about
"...a practice of writing other than that which was dominant in the teaching
of poetry in the 1960s - of the personal anecdote or personal experience
presented through the first person"?
Finally, about "the strain of commercially published poetry that works
that way" - I can certainly recognize the phenomenon, as with collections
based on the death of a loved one or illness. Their general success I'd put
down to the media needing a handle to pick poetry up with, rather than the
usual bargepole, but also, understandably, human interest on the part of
readers. These things I'd be much happier to deal with on a case by case
basis (some in my view having real merit, others not) than according to some
generic recoil from personal experience.
Maybe the Perloff article you're thinking of was her review of Rita
Dove's anthology. Her argument against one particular poem she singled out
as merely personal was, it seemed to me, fair enough.
Sorry I haven't time now for a more thought-out response. And thanks for the
bon voyage,
Jamie
-----Original Message-----
From: Hampson, R
Sent: Friday, November 28, 2014 5:48 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: the avant garde vs. the lyrical:the telephone book
Hi, Jamie -
I decided to decide that any attack was on Olson.
I included the quotation with the idea that it was available to creative
misinterpretation; I hadn't considered that it could have become an
orthodoxy, although my citation hadn't excluded this possibility. The
sentence encouraged my own practice in the 1970s, because it chimed with my
preference for indirection, and my interest then in exploring expression
through factual details and citation. However, this practice co-existed with
a fascination with Donne and Herbert, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Ginsberg and
Levertov ... Does a poetics that enables my own practice have to preclude
appreciation of other ways of working?
* I have just checked: I am 7 years older. My mid-60s sixth-form teacher was
a Leavisite, so the idea of biography and anything other than the words on
the page was discouraged. At the same time, we were also linked in to
Critical Quarterly, which I remember as publishing Plath and Berryman;
MacNiece and Lowell and Gunn were also part of the school-poetry
contemporary mix. Not so much 'personal anecdote', then, as heavy doses of
US confessionalism. (I think you are mixing biographical criticism with
personal anecdote in this paragraph.)
(As undergraduates at King's, we were given a poem by Charles Olson to read
in a first-year poetry seminar by the Head of Department, Geoffrey
Bullough - which still seems to me an unusual poem for him to have selected.
Otherwise, I don't remember much 20th-century poetry being taught beyond
Yeats and Eliot and Wallace Stevens.)
* I agree that poetry of personal anecdote' is the regularly repeated
charge - and it is worth being called on it. There is a strain of
commercially published poetry which works that way - would you accept that?
There is also a tendency - as in The X Factor - to foreground an
'exceptional' experience: the death of a child, the death of one's partner,
writing about one's midlands family. This has struck me as a distinct
difference between poetry readings by the former group as against the kind
of poetry readings I more usually attend - that is, in terms of how the poet
or the person doing the introductions frames the work. Ann Carson's Nox,
however, with its prompt from the death of her brother, I find very
interesting in its approach to this personal material. As you say, it is not
a matter of the use of personal experience, but rather how this is handled
and transformed.
I don't think the suggestion is that its use is unmediated or unconsidered,
but rather (I am half-recalling here an essay by Marjorie Perloff that I
don't have to hand) that there is a too easy formula of personal anecdote
followed by moral conclusion.
I haven't checked the current Poetry Review, but this sounds like pertinent
evidence.
I hope you enjoy your trip to India,
Best wishes
Robert
-----Original Message-----
From: British & Irish poets [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Jamie McKendrick
Sent: 28 November 2014 16:28
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: the avant garde vs. the lyrical:the telephone book
Hi Robert,
Following Peter's response to your Olson quote:
'Objectism is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual
as ego ... that peculiar presumption by which western man has interposed
himself between what he is as a creature of nature ... and those other
creations of nature which we may, with no derogation call objects'.
my own may well have seemed like an attack on you, or indeed on Olson.
Neither was really intended. What I felt reading it was an impatience that
this position, from however remarkable a poet, had become a kind of
orthodoxy, and could be used to annul a vast tradition that is by no means
only that of "western man", and even within a western history has so many
rich and curious variations.
Two things, I'm afraid in haste, that strike me. First is that, though
I'm guessing we're near contemporaries my experience of this dominant
experience of teaching - in the 60s or do you mean the 70s? - was very
different, which of course doesn't discount your own. Olson was taught in
the American dept. of the University where I studied and in the English
dept. the idea that there was any stress on personal anecdote seems utterly
unrecognisable. Sure we were expected to know something about Maud Gonne in
reading Yeats but that went with all kinds of provisos about the
biographical fallacy. Prevailing Eliotic or even Leavisite strictures would
have been as inhospitable to the idea as any contemporary avant-gardist.
Even the old New Criticism might not want to be tarred with this particular
brush. I'd be surprised if things were that different now, though you'll
know a lot more of that.
The second thing is in two parts. One, and this is somewhat also in reply
to Tim's last post, I get very fed up with the idea that the 'personal
anecdote' is the determining feature of mainstream poetry. It just seems to
me blatantly untrue. Out of curiosity I looked at the latest issue of Poetry
Review, often seen as the bastion of mainstream conservatism. Apart from the
main prose articles being on Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill's Collected
Poems, both of a high quality, and a fine article on Ashbery's French
translations by David Wheatley, the poems just don't fit this description.
Well, one or two could be made to conform - but the one most obviously
related to family experience, by US poet Jodie Hollander called 'Splitting
and Fucking', seems very effectively to blow up the genre. Carrie Etter, as
it happens, has a poem with a strong family connection which is in no way
fettered by that. Some of the more interesting poems eschew the personal
altogether. This evidence, as they say, is merely 'anecdotal', but it leads
me to a second response: that I don't anyway have any desire to see personal
experience outlawed from poems. I welcome it if it can be made significant
or transformed. I see a lot hangs on if and how such things are transformed,
but it's merely patronising to assume that poets that use personal
experience will do so in an unmediated and unconsidered way.
Anecdote is just a dismissive word for story, and stories have always,
however refracted or minimal, been part of a lyric tradition, as well as of
the longer poem, and not just to retrograde or conservative versions of
those.
I remember being struck by a question Peter Riley asked long ago and in a
different context - "when did we get to be so haughty?". I hope he won't
object to this being used here, quite possibly in defence of certain poetic
practices he has no interest in, but this disdain for personal experience
seems to me to warrant it.
I'm in India for the next week so may not be able to pick up any replies. I
hasten to add my trip nothing to do with the British Council. (Incidentally,
that part of the Patterson quote is way out-of-date as, far as I'm aware,
it's been years since they funded any poetry jaunts...so at least in this
respect we can all happily skulk in the same sinking boat.) Jamie
-----Original Message-----
From: Hampson, R
Sent: Friday, November 28, 2014 12:07 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: the avant garde vs. the lyrical:the telephone book
I was interested in Olson's statement as the prompt for a practice of
writing other than that which was dominant in the teaching of poetry in the
1960s - of the personal anecdote or personal experience presented through
the first person.
Robert
PR
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