Trevor's book is very fine, and much more than you paint it, Peter. Breen's is also very fine. As you like to tell us, we needn't choose between them.
-----Original Message-----
>From: Peter Riley <[log in to unmask]>
>Sent: Jan 13, 2018 4:21 AM
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Metronome
>
>Of course it is absolutely fine if it works for you and it does for many, and some can’t operate without it and nothing has quite been the same since. But you don’t have to join that club to be modern. G. Stein never released me into anything, neither Spenser needed modernising, nor do I know of any conflict between “concept”and “rhyme, alliteration”, which can occur as they occur not by rote.
> (alliteration: Michael Haslam!!). What I’m saying is it doesn’t have to be either/or.
>
>This- http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/issue19/DaraghBreenBM19.html.
>will take you to an Irish (indeed Cork) poet who doesn’t need to modernise himself or anybody else, being already where it is. If it works. I don’t think it will.
>I don’t fail to recognise good impulses, worries about the state of the world, in what is, now, a programme
>Good morning world. It’s dark and dull here, I think I’ll go back to bed.
>PR
>
>
>On 13 Jan 2018, at 4:44 am, jesse <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>Facebook is a terrible place to try to discuss anything worthwhile--the whole concept of gaining 'friends' without knowing who they are strikes me as being a bit backwards and, well,...strange-- but a recent thread on Facebook regarding a mean-spirited review in the Irish Times of Trevor Joyce's 'Fastness'--a translation of Spenser's Mutabilitie Cantos from early modern English into contemporary English--points in exactly the same direction as the Metronome thread here, and perhaps illustrates the rift between those drawn by the old toolbox of rhyme, alliteration, etc., vs. those in the know about modern and post-modern poetry where concept counts as much if not more than what results from its application. Here's what John McAuliffe has to say, in part, in his review of 9/23/2017:
>
>Trevor Joyce is...historically relativist in his approach to the landscape, and to language. His latest is the punningly titled Fastness (Miami University Press, $17) and “translates” the closing pages of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. In his introduction, Joyce tenuously outlines his family connections to Spenser, and also discusses vocabulary he has used as “beyond the precincts of the Queen’s English […]an artificial dialect.”
>
>...Beautifully produced, with Spenser’s original stanzas on the facing page to Joyce’s “translations”, the reader can’t help glancing across from, say, Joyce’s “Startled, Diana rushed / out of the treacherous/ waters, and by the echoing / bellowing, found him / in his illicit hide, and trapped / him like a dazzled lark there” to Spenser’s “The Goddess, all abashed with that noise, / In haste forth started from the guilty Brook; / And running straight whereas she heard his voice, / Enclosed the bush about, and there him took, / Like darred Lark.”
>
>McAuliffe goes on to offer other flash reviews which seek to encapsulate a book of poetry in a paragraph or so, with the laurels being handed to traditionalists and award-winners: a perfect way to achieve a deadline and yet still appear to be in the game. Anything other than that--and Joyce's re-visionings of Spencer are certainly 'other' to McAuliffe-- takes a certain charity and sense of fairness, not to mention time. Where does the hurried reviewer go, then?--to the tried and true master of the old tricks of the trade--and Spenser certainly was a master of those very effects that Pound helped us free ourselves from. They are, unfortunately, bewitchingly unfolded in the Faerie Queen, as McAuliffe suggests. In the end, Trevor appears to be fighting the same fight that Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and so many others fought and incrementally won--but not everywhere, apparently--and not to one hurried, and unfair, reviewer.
>
>I like what Trevor's done. It's ballsy to take on someone like Spenser, for whatever reason. Tom Phillips (among others) did something similar with Dante's Inferno back in the 1980's. I agree with Pierre Joris that new explorations of prosody are in order and thank him for the title of Doug Oliver's book, which I'll certainly look up. And now, in perfect Facebook fashion, I'll take the time to purchase and read Trevor's book.
>
>Jesse
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