John, can I pass this along, with your name? I think it would be greatly appreciated.


-----Original Message-----
>From: GOODBY JOHN <[log in to unmask]>
>Sent: Jul 28, 2016 11:11 AM
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: a bit ofresearch
>
>I'm probably the wrong person to respond to this - as a poet I'd say I'm not
>personally particularly affected by Thomas in any obvious way, except in the
>sense that he was one who was committed to the 'revolution of the word'. But as
>an academic, the editor of his poems and author of a monograph on his poetry
>(Under the spelling wall, Liverpool UP, 2013), he's immensely important to me.
>I'm presently completing a guide to his poetry and notebooks, editing a
>facsimile of the newly discovered fifth notebook, and about to begin a brief
>biography. So I'm saturated in him, that way. And all I'd say, with that hat on,
>is that his work, at its best, is magnificent, darkly witty, rooted in an
>understanding and playful exploitation of the division between language as
>medium and message-bearer. Its obsession with 'process' and the body, it's
>womb-tomb, microcosmic and biomorphic coordinates, are a response to the
>stalling of high modernism and the onset of the 1930s crisis - strip away the
>surfaces and this is what you have - and they also flow from Thomas' own
>liminal, hybrid nature (Anglo-Welsh, on the cusp between Cymrophone and
>anglophone Wales, between industrial and rural zones, and, even more
>elementally, land and sea). He fuses (a favourite word) the collage jump-cutting
>of modernism with the retro metrical forms and return to standard syntax of the
>Audenesque poets, and straddles the fault-line between  'mainstream' and
>'innovative' which has existed in British poetry since ca. 1930. This is one
>reason - a resurgence of little-Englander sentiment was another - why, after
>faring pretty well for 2 decades after his death, he was dumped from the
>histories of the period written after the late 1970s (see Valentine Cunningham,
>Neil Corcoran, et al). It's difficult to incorporate a poet who wrote both
>'Altarwise by owl-light', one of the most fiendishly difficult modernist poems
>in the language, and 'Fern Hill', everyone's Mum's favourite, into the
>Hardy-Auden-Larkin-Raine-Armitage (yes, I know I exaggerate, but you know what I
>mean) narrative, and he's paid the price - high visibility, low understanding. I
>think he remains a fascinating, crucial figure, a major influence on WS Graham,
>Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and even on later, experimental figures (check out
>Ralph Maud's acknowledgement to one JH Prynne in his 1968 edition of the
>notebooks), and we won't understand 20thC poetry until we understand him more
>fully. To repeat, or rather recast: Thomas is basically a modernist poet
>interested in language and what it can do and have done to it, not a
>late-Romantic confessionalist. Some of what has been done recently has tried to
>focus on that - on his foregrounding of the materiality of language, his use of
>multiple negatives to create qualified statement, his indebtedness to
>contemporary popular science (Whitehead, Eddington, Jeans, Huxley, etc.), so
>hopefully a more just and balanced appreciation is starting to emerge. But
>apologies for rambling on, and at the same time barely scratching the surface.
>I'm on holiday at the moment (back 1 August), but would be happy to rejoin the
>discussion later - and if anyone wants to discuss any of this b/c, please feel
>free.
>
>> On 28 July 2016 at 05:26 Dylan Harris <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> I¹m in the slightly odd position of almost having the same name as Thomas.
>> When I was a computing science student, and drunk, strangers told me I
>> looked like him. My mother assured me the forename was coincidence, that
>> it is an ordinary name in my father¹s homeland. My father, who died before
>> I ask him anything, was rather fond of poetry. I came to poetry late, and
>> am self-mistaught.
>> 
>> So, to answer the question, yes, he played a role in my development, but
>> it¹s complicated. Similarly for poetry. I love the sonics, the
>> reverberations, the unexpected sympathies.
>> 
>> Since I wasn¹t a poetry student, I didn¹t get the need for hobnail
>> contrived pseudo-linguistic japes out of my system. You¹ll have to forgive
>> me for this. Isn¹t Audenware a type of pottery?
>> 
>> Dylan Harris
>> https://dylanharris.org/
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On 27/07/2016, 16:23, "British & Irish poets on behalf of Mark Weiss"
>> <[log in to unmask] on behalf of [log in to unmask]>
>> wrote:
>> 
>> >Any extremely unscientific survey.
>> >
>> >Dylan Thomas came up on a facebook thread. The respondents were all
>> >poets. The question: what part did Dylan Thomas play in your development?
>> >How do you value his poetry now?
>> >
>> >There seemed to me a clear division in the responses. Those descended
>> >from, schooled by, you get my drift, Eliot and Audenwere rhapsodic about
>> >him, those descended from the New American Poetry less so or not at all.
>> >I said it was unscientific. Fact is, I can't remember his ever being
>> >mentioned by the poets I know, except as a phase of their poetic
>> >adolescence. The same is true of my British non-mainstream poet friends.
>> >I don't remember his ever coming up on this list, either.
>> >
>> >So? How would you answer the question(s)? I'll convey the results, sans
>> >names, if you please.
>> >
>> >Best,
>> >
>> >Mark