On Sunday, 1 May 2016, Sean Carey <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
It all depends Tim on what one is seeking from poetry or indeed wonders what the actual purpose of poetry is in 2016 in a complex world. In your own work I see a sincere project in progress which is rare enough across the overall output I see mostly on the internet. In the context of poetry as a full time or part time career the actual artistic aspect must be defined not fudged. As David Antin explained many famous artists are or were keen students of the NY Stock Exchange but their PR presents them as humble folk. We may dislike economics yet it governs our lives in a total way if art of any kind is merely a commodity. Point being to look in a fresh way at divisions in poetry perhaps being tactical rather than driven by convictions. This then erases the divides as being not as serious as we have thought for decades but more positioning perhaps? A career choice of poetry full or part time is unlike Basil Bunting's point on poetry as a hobby. We live in a world where people have to account for their income and savings or earned cash. This mainly is focused on people in political life so artists seldom face a media hostility to declare their income. Of course on any general list there are huge economic margins with many living on limited incomes as well as those on middle to high incomes. Few on this list will ever sell books in vast amounts or become household names. To then presume they are all poor is to move beyond the usual economic statistics of any general grouping of individuals. There is money to be made via poetry through the routes we all know such as the education system literary figures are drawn to on these islands. No point in mentioning these places or indeed the locations. All of that has been explained before yet few inside that bubble ever explain their circumstances. To claim to be on the left is all too easy in our day but how many ever practice their brands of neo socialism? A huge gap exists between writing about one's love for the poor and doing something however micro about poverty. On any political march one walks past people begging on the same streets or sleeping rough. In Dublin the homeless hostels are now so violent people opt to sleep in public parks using their runners as pillows. An Irish poet I am sure may well write a poem about this man but that same poet may well have spare room in his or her home. Indeed many have many spare rooms to give shelter and food to homeless people. The violence in the hostels means a vacuum exists with many preferring prison to sleeping rough. To house one homeless person is an act of necessary humanity not macro in solving the overall problem. Yet a small step in the right direction as well as poetry readings for worthy charity organisations can be considered. Maybe Tim we expect too much from poetry and poets but your desire to seek some truth merits huge respect. Well done! Sean
On Tuesday, 26 April 2016, Tim Allen <[log in to unmask]> wrote: I see the spectrum or essential difference question as being like the wave/particle duality in electromagnetism - mostly anyway - especially if we take poets like your Harwood and Hughes example. It depends upon what you are looking for, or where you are looking, what aspect you are measuring - measuring with your pleasure receptors or whatever. If you take your adjectival list describing the poetry of Gustafsson (unless you mean all of them in the 'traditional' sense), many of the 'experimental' poets I like use narrative, tone and irony, even if none are quite what we might expect in a mainstream poem. Narrative is more likely to be implied or fragmented, but it's still narrative as a device. Tone - whole areas of possible tonal manipulation are possible when a poet breaks out of the typical mainstream mode. Irony becomes something else, often twisting into something extreme. Etc. In the past I've put forward the idea that it is the modern UK mainstream poem that is the real anomaly within poetry as a whole, both with regard to the past and to poetry internationally, not the linguistically innovative. I've never been picked up on it or challenged and like a lot of these things I don't even know if I could explain exactly why or if I could pick my evidence convincingly. But this does point to the direction from which I've consistently tried to talk about this issue, emphasising the variations in so-called experimental while trying to home in on the peculiarities of a Duffy poem etc. That is of course the opposite of what we are trying to do in this discussion. On 25 Apr 2016, at 12:55, [log in to unmask] wrote: > I've spent a bit of time thinking about your question about the spectrum and I haven't come up with an easy or fully satisfying answer. > > On the whole I tend towards the view that experimental/traditional is an either/or and best treated, almost, as separate artforms. That is, I see each form as having evolved its own rules, tactics, aspirations and the practitioner either does one or does the other, but you can't really do both at the same time. My analogy would be serial/tonal music as conceived by Schoenberg. He could compose either sort, but the procedures were so different that there wasn't really a middle position between the two. Either you had a tone-row or you had a key signature. > > And on the whole I think this is the best model to describe the two poets I mentioned. If you use the "new sentence" (Silliman's valuable term), then the mind-blowing polyvocality of Lisa Samuels' Tomorrowland becomes possible. But on the other hand the kind of things Lars Gustafsson can do with traditional narrative, anecdote, tone and irony and so on become unavailable. His art requires the "old sentence". > > So with that kind of model in mind I am usually a little prejudiced against the hybridity promoted in recent years. But I think others might see it differently. I'm aware that the "new sentence" is only one aspect of modern poetry and that there are poets I care for very much (Lee Harwood, Peter Hughes spring to mind) for whom the on/off model seems entirely to break down, and when contemplating those poets a spectrum model of universal discourse seems to reassert itself.
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