All this anthology talk has made me get my copy of New British Poetry (Ed. Paterson and Simic) down from the dust and reread Paterson's infamous intro where he spends over half of it slamming the material he has not included in the anthology because it is by the 'postmoderns'. I tried writing about this at the time but gave up, coming out the other side with the thought that Paterson was basically confused, completely out of his depth with the issue, but trying desperately to show that he knew what he was talking about, and that it was this rather than pure nastiness that lay at the root of the viciousness. And at least he's honest about it, I thought, he's been drawn into the open.
Paterson might have been intellectually light weight but he wasn't stupid. By the early '00s it had become evident that the 'postmoderns' and 'names who wrote certain stuff' had not somehow gone away, had not given up the ghost, the opposite in fact, their profile and influence had grown. It was no longer the case that they could be simply ignored, as they had been through most of the 80's and 90's, so they had to be dealt with (note I say 'dealt with' and not 'engaged with') - hence this very weird aspect to the introduction of an anthology of Brit poets for American readers. You can feel the fear in the piece, a kind of panic. I think the length and intensity of the attack was down to a strange type of guilt, otherwise why bother.
If there is anyone out there who has not got the book I recommend you somehow get to read that introduction. I know that what it says shocked some younger innovative poets and performers when they came across it a decade later because they just could not understand the basis for the nastiness, let alone the blinkered reading of certain poetry. I would like to know what Paterson's view is of it now, too.
Cheers
Tim
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