Here are Marjorie Perloff's and Ira Lightman's responses:



Marjorie Perloff
 
A. C. Evans is quite right to complain about the purported denial of “voice” in contemporary poetry, but the issue is not, I think, the refusal to engage with popular culture.  First, in the best “language” or other experimental poetries, of course there IS voice, despite all the claims to the contrary.  A Tom Raworth poem is easily distinguishable from one by J. H. Prynne, and so on. I¹ve written about this in my essay on language poetry for Critical Inquiry, reprinted in DIFFERENTIALS.  But secondly -- and more important -- why should poetry, or any art, just cave in to pop culture?  I realize it has happened in the visual arts, and look at the results.  Not exactly works of genius.  The key example here -- and one that Evans does mention, not in this article but in his interview with Jeffrey Side, is that of Beckett.  Beckett never compromised with anyone or anything, and yet, although his writing is very “difficult”, it is also enormously popular and today read and studied around the world. That¹s because Beckett has a unique vision of life and unique language usages.  Now, for Evans, Beckett is a “prose writer” and hence not quite part of the present conversation, but I maintain that Beckett, who began as a poet, even though not a satisfactory one, remains first and foremost a poet, in that it is the density of language -- its sound, multiplex nature, visual aura, and so on -- that is foregrounded.
  
It¹s not a matter, in other words, of using this mode or that one, being part of this school or that one, but having individual genius. There are plenty of very fine poets today -- perhaps just not in England at the moment or in the U.S. But in less likely places.
 
Still, Evans is on to something important which is the utter nullity of much that currently passes for poetry. I have a different diagnosis, though. I think, at least here in the U.S., the real fault is not the refusal to engage pop culture but the unliterariness of “poetry” so-called.  Most of our poets NEVER READ ANY POETRY or other literary work. It¹s so absurd. They want to be “poets” but heaven forbid they should read any when they can be reading theory or political tracts or whatever.  Contrary to Evans, I believe it's the wanting to be “with it” that is destroying the poetry scene. If you want to be a poet, you have to have some sense of the poetic tradition.  Look at the de Campos brothers in Brazil, Augusto and Haroldo, those marvelous poets who have also translated everyone from Dante to Rimbaud to the writings of Boulez and Cage. But Evans's historical analysis (1968 etc.) is very useful.


Ira Lightman
 
I can think of poetry in films, Auden's poetry in Four Weddings and a Funeral, or e.e. cummings in Hannah and Her Sisters. This is poetry from a previous period that mass popular culture has caught up with, so that it's ready for it to appear. I can perfectly imagine any of the poets Evans mentions being quoted in films, but not for some time. It takes a while for unacknowledged legislators to matter more than they did at the time. Am I supposed to feel morally upbraided because I can remember lines from poems from several of the poets disparaged here? I go to church for that.
 
Termed blue is perfectly blue. The bee … evades the half-light. Brag, sweet tenor bull. I can see things in these lines. In song lyrics, I can always see the singer looking at them. In songs, words follow an emotional logic, as they do in playwriting. Songwriters usually reach for description and write either a good screenplay - you can see it in a film - or badly. They don't linger like a painter. And all the painters who have made it into mass popular culture still do make you linger.
 
There's surely a gridlock of I in the world, and rage of the sort in this essay behind it. Where does Evans show he has any time for any of these poets? Who do you love, as Eric Clapton once said, Is it me, is it him, babe, I don't know. Is Evans saying that postmodern poets fear to face an audience? Look at Ron Mann's film Poetry in Motion. It shows people using non-I language tactics, but being very much on the spot in performance.
 
I see the younger and older generation of American postmodernists wrestling with a LOVE for (not an obedience to) postmodern poetry (which after all had the label thrust upon it). And then a desire to go out far and wide. Sure, people play safe. But that effort makes my pulse race, makes the writer's pulse and the audience's pulse race. Surely that is the world of personal risk in poetry.