Am I here being responded to as a stand-in avant-gardist, rehearsing yet
another denigration of a despised category of poet? If so, almost every
part of that feels quaint and I must go back to shutting up.
I think I first encountered the Stafford poem in an old style Critical
Quarterly pamphlet called American Poetry 1965, which I have just re-found
in my shelves, and may well not have read since that year. I read the poem
carefully again because I wanted to know what had stayed with me all those
years to the extent that it immediately came to mind when Robert gave his
brief indication. It seems as though I like it rather more than you do.
First-person pluralling, which I picked out as of especial interest to me,
is certainly not confined to the alleged lyrical mainstream. ¡®We¡¯ and
¡®our¡¯ may well be a lot more troublesome than ¡®I¡¯.
In your own work, Peter, how easy is it to keep apart the ¡®moral¡¯ and the
¡®aesthetic¡¯?
John
On 01/12/2014 12:56, "Peter Riley" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>I don't want to make any big claims for the Stafford poem. It's
>pedestrian and it does one of the unforgivable things in my book, it
>interrupts itself to explain the circumstances. When that happens the
>poetry, even the gentlest depictive poetry, has to stop until it can
>be resumed. Jaime's prose sketch was more touching. What worries me is
>the terms under which the avant-garde attacks poetry such as this,
>which is always moral rather than aesthetic, and assumptive concerning
>what is transmitted. For a century or so the avant-garde (which I'm
>using as a blanket term) has claimed moral high ground on the basis
>either of political rectitude or the status of the selfhood in the
>poem, sometimes cunningly encompassing both at once. Mere self-
>referral is read as inevitably self-centering or selfishness thus a
>sign of bad character. so poems are dismissed as "good guy" poems. And
>yet the history of the avant-garde displays a collection of some of
>the greatest egotists of the century (also greatest snobs and greatest
>bullies) accompanied by a mass of extremely bad political thinking.
>
>As John knows as well as I, those who have been through "Cambridge"
>have been taught to disdain the genial in poetry and denigrate all
>merely social virtues, and to present an aggressive or a least
>rebarbative surface to the reader, attitudes inherited from Wyndham
>Lewis (Artist as Enemy) as well as Leavis, which persist and are
>increasingly strong not just in ex-Cambridge, where they think they
>are soldiers for the right, but in just about the whole of the avant-
>garde. (except the good guys).
>
>pr
>
>
>On 29 Nov 2014, at 10:00, Hall, John wrote:
>
>Whether it makes any difference in the case of this particular poem is
>one
>thing, whether it ever makes any difference another. The appeal to the
>authority of personal experience is often a strong rhetorical tactic and
>of course not just in poetry. As a mode it places the vulnerability of
>the
>speaker/writer in the position of human shield for language. It is
>praised, is it not, as Œauthenticity©ö and for its courage, which is
>often
>real enough. As has been mentioned it can also be scorned as mere
>anecdotalism, argument founded on case studies of one, and those perhaps
>as trustworthy as Andrew Mitchell©ös. (Incidentally the etymology of
>anecdote is, apparently, Œnot published©ö. On that basis once an anecdote
>is published it loses its right to the designation!)
>
>In Stafford©ös poem it seems to me that the crux lies not in the first
>person singular but in the first person plural. It only becomes apparent
>towards the end that the ŒI©ö is not alone in the scene, with first Œthe
>car ahead©ö and then Œour group©ö. The second last line is where I suspect
>that its popularity ¡© I think it is a popular poem ¡© arises:
>
> I thought hard for us all¡©¡©my only swerving.
>
>This implies that there is a lot at stake in I's decision, whose
>implications go well beyond this Œwilderness©ö; I feels the burden of
>exemplariness, which may be one of the (welcome) burdens of a particular
>kind of lyric poem. This incident is Œfor us all©ö. Does it matter
>whether
>or not the incident actually occurred to the assembler of these words?
>If
>it didn©öt then the assumption of priestly authority ¡© the one authorised
>to conduct sacrifice ¡© is the more extreme. I think it matters only to
>that extent. And as you imply, Peter, without searching outside the
>poem,
>how could we know? I suspect that the force of the poem depends just as
>much on the retrieval of the word Œswerving©ö, which has earlier been
>used
>unmetaphorically for the risk to drivers©ö lives of a dead animal left on
>this particular road. It returns metaphorically as an ethical term, and
>leaves hanging in the poem an equivocation about all that thought Œfor
>us
>all©ö.
>
>Is there a whole genre, not quite coinciding with what people might or
>might not be meaning by Œlyric©ö, that could be called the homiletic? The
>incident is the text for the day. This is how I recall the (Anglican)
>sermons of my childhood.
>
>All best,
>John
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>On 28/11/2014 20:28, "Peter Riley" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> I can't see how it makes any difference whatsoever whether this
>> incident actually happened to Stafford or not. And how would we know
>> anyway? When we speak of "poetry of personal [sc. authorial]
>> experience" are we not actually speaking of narrative poetry as such?
>> Of story? Which is certainly not restricted in usage to any fictional
>> mainstream.
>>
>> PR
>>
>>
>> On 28 Nov 2014, at 20:09, Hall, John wrote:
>>
>> William Stafford, Travelling through the Dark??
>>
>> http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171495.
>>
>> Now where did that come from?
>>
>> John
>>
>> On 28/11/2014 19:38, "Hampson, R" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
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