Very well said, Tony. We have indeed been there before — are there all the time, & it’s a waste of time to bemoan the sadly trite & tritely sad facts. Though I certainly would like bookshops to have those different sections for poetry too — at least those that still have an actual poetry section…
Pierre
p.s. on something completely different: a while back someone brought up Schwitters on this list, can’t remember the exact context, but I was thinking then: Kurtchen is an excellent example of a serious avant-garde poet/artist who also happened to be for awhile at least a very popular poet ("Anna Blume” was the equivalent of a pop hit in Germany). After his death, except for the Ursonate as classic of soon/performance poetry, the writing was forgotten / hidden because the moola is in wall-art: his collages & visual works were picked up by museums worldwide & now it was KS the artist. How many people know that in 1974 Dumont Verlag brought out his Collected Writings: 4 big 3 to 400 page volumes gathering all the poetry, proses & plays. A massive opus. In 1993 Jerome Rothenberg & I brought out a Selected Writings under the title pppppp (Temple U Press, reprinted by exact change & still in print). The pleasure and sheer delight of discovering the width of KS’s literary work & of translating it is still with me.
> On Feb 1, 2018, at 8:21 AM, Tony Frazer <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
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> The poetry world is bedevilled by the fact that it’s all described as “poetry”. No-one in the fiction world mistakes Dan Brown for James Joyce, and thus they’re in different sections of Waterstone’s and Amazon. Alas, we’re now in the situation that Rupi Kaur is on the shelf next to PJ Kavanagh, Hollie McNish next to Paul Muldoon, with no apparent differentiation. I have no issue at all with Ms Kaur selling her trite verses by the bucketload, as it would appear that many young readers want it, or think they do, and I doubt the sales are being stolen away from “serious poets". That’s all fine. One should also not mistake it for a broadening of the poetry audience. It ain’t. Where I do have an issue is the conflation of what she’s doing (and Hollie McNish for that matter) with “poetry”. We need a better term. Andrew Duncan refers to certain kinds of writing as “art-poetry” but that term won’t hold water in the big bad world out there. On the other hand, I’m old enough to recall the appalling million-selling volumes by Rod McKuen. And there’s Pam Ayres. Patience Strong. Etc etc. Have we not been here before?
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