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

-----Original Message-----
From: British & Irish poets [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On 
Behalf Of Peter Riley
Sent: 27 November 2014 16:50
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: the avant garde vs. the lyrical:the telephone book

Yes, those presumptions, and others, including that "ego" is some kind of 
undesirable disease or malfunction.

But hey! Where do you get "Nuer poems to cattle"? That would be a breath of 
fresh air.

PR