David, I know what you're saying is all relative but 'having a large audience of all social groups and educational levels' would disqualify all contemporary poets except perhaps three or four. At least this is an attempt at a definition but it all seems to me as futile as trying to analyse phlogiston or ether.
I assume what Robert is saying is that the avantgarde is the main stream, the central tradition, the others creeks and backwaters...
Jamie
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> On 19 Jan 2018, at 13:20, David Lace <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
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> Robert, are you really saying that the avantgarde is mainstream? That’s novel.
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> To me mainstream means having a large audience of all social groups and educational levels (someone like Prynne, for instance, wouldn’t fall into that bracket) and avantgarde means (among other things) seeing language as non-transparent (Henri, Patten and McGough, for instance, wouldn’t fall into that bracket).
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> Henri being ignored in later life doesn’t mean he is not mainstream, unless being ignored is now considered as being avantgarde.
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> Robert Hampson wrote:
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> I think Henri’s position complicates any simple opposition of avant-garde / ‘mainstream’. Apart from the argument that the ‘avant-garde’ is, in fact, the ‘mainstream’ … from Browning through Pound and onwards …, the sociology of poetry is more complicated than a binary. Many years ago Wolfgang Gortschacher organized a symposium in Salzburg, which brought together various groups of English(indeed, British) poets that his researches had engaged with: London ‘innovative’ poets; Cambridge poets; the Stand group; northern working-class poets; Durham university poets …
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> Patten ran an interesting little magazine, Underdog, which published ‘beat’ poetry from the US and UK – as a counter-cultural publication. Pattern, Henri, McGough were initially part of the counter-cultural poetry reading movement – and this came in from a lot of flak from ‘mainstream’ page-based poets. The Penguin volume was a smart / opportunistic move on Penguin’s part, but Henri’s later works If my memory is right) were back with the small presses. It is hard to over-estimate the amount of resistance Henri met from the literary establishment.
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> Robert
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