Hi Michael,
I had to look up cantabile.
The history of the idea that lyrical and experimental are contrasted terms goes way back to the 70's with a bunch of assumptions and misreadings people made about the poetry of the so-called Poetry Revival crowd. The Poetry Revival lot were a mixed bunch anyway but from the offset they all got tarred with the same brush and it didn't take long for those assumptions and misreadings to become fixed doctrine - things like, 'If you are not being personal then you cannot be lyrical' and a whole load of similar things.
That situation has always been complicated by the fact that there were some left-field poets who were quite pleased with the distance such notions put between them and their mainstream critics so they tended to reinforce those readings, especially in their statements and polemic, even if what was happening in their actual work was far less simplistic. So both sides are responsible.
So no, you're right, the idea didn't start with Andrew Duncan, but the problem with Andrew is that it is usually impossible to distinguish what are his observations, or descriptions, from his personal poetics. I think that's the way he likes it though.
Cheers
Tim
On 25 Nov 2014, at 11:31, [log in to unmask] wrote:
> In case there's anyone left who isn't fed up with this topic!
>
> I saw this in a helpful review by blogger Gareth Prior of Andrea Brady's Cut From The Rushes:
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> ...The poems are a response to their own times enacted in the language rather than simply communicated through the language.
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> In this Brady is a lyric poet as much as she is an experimental one (to the extent that either category is useful beyond the world of publishers’ catalogues and review shorthand). Her poems maintain a powerful creative tension between a modernist distrust of meaning and the urgency of direct communication, and in doing so manage to synthesize the best of two very different traditions. ....
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> http://garethprior.org/the-fault-of-language-andrea-brady/
>
> Don't mean to dig too critically into Gareth's meaning - he seems to be emphasizing the expressive element of "lyrical" here. (as opposed to personal or melodious; though all three are connected, of course) . I share his parenthetical unease about the term, i.e. I never find "lyrical" much use when I'm writing about poetry. Possibly this is because of the view I already expressed that every artefact has the potential to be viewed as expressive, cantabile and personal.
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> What Gareth does register, as this discussion has done, is a widespread tendency to use lyrical and experimental as contrasted terms. That seems totally unhelpful to me. In most obvious senses Maggie O'Sullivan is far more "lyrical" than Peter Porter. If Andrew Duncan must bear the blame for that, his shoulders are broad enough, but I guess it didn't start with him - I'd like to know the history of this idea.
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