And rather more British poetry politics than any sane human could be expected to bear. I was just continuing the conversation from John's and others' remarks not thinking of facebook.
The topic interests me - but I always find it hard to determine what influence is operative and how significant it is. Let me ponder a while.
Jamie
  Ps. He did indeed Giles, and I was trying to link to a Telegraph article that quotes his very favourable response to the pissed parodic figure that appeared.
   

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> On 28 Jul 2016, at 18:46, Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> That's rather more british poetry politics than the facebook threaders will be aware of. How did Thomas feature in your own formation, Jamie?
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Jamie McKendrick <[log in to unmask]>
>> Sent: Jul 28, 2016 1:30 PM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: a bit ofresearch
>> 
>> Mark's "a phase of their poetic adolescence" doesn't surprise me as an 
>> account of many poets' response to Dylan Thomas. In a way, mine too. Only 
>> that should acknowledge the great importance, the condicio sine qua non 
>> (excusing my French), of adolescence. "Everyone's mum", in John's message, 
>> seems to me to show excellent taste in having Fern Hill as her favourite - 
>> it's a poem of extraordinary, fluid beauty. I can see how for John there 
>> might be a need to rescue Thomas from many decades of academic oblivion by 
>> emphasising his modernist, his "microcosmic and biomorphic coordinates", but 
>> he needs little rescuing on behalf of the public who have continued to 
>> revere him. I was given a lift a few months back by someone who rarely reads 
>> any poetry and top of the pile of CDs was Dylan Thomas reading his poems. In 
>> my experience this is quite typical - Thomas is the last truly popular poet 
>> we've had.
>>   The Movement's reaction against the perceived emotionalism of his work 
>> has been documented, but the only reference I've found from admittedly early 
>> Larkin is one expressing delight and admiration. The tedious assumption, 
>> much repeated on this list, that the Movement's aesthetics flow seamlessly 
>> into what's called the contemporary 'mainstream' (including Northern Irish 
>> poetry) leads to another fallacious assumption that this grouping 
>> disapproves of Thomas.
>> Jamie
>> 
>> -----Original Message----- 
>> From: GOODBY JOHN
>> Sent: Thursday, July 28, 2016 4:11 PM
>> 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 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