Hello Mark (Leahy)
We spoke for a moment or two at the Colloquium and it was good to have
done.
I'm not sure about your detecting "anxiety" in my piece with regards to
the influence of Americans on British work in quite the way you suggest.
(However, I will acknowledge that the paper I referred to in my piece,
which I delivered at Southampton Conf WAS about the that particular
influence of anxiety, and was also one of the sparks of the dreadful term
"linguistically innovative poetry".)
I was trying to outline, negatively, the delineations of a particulkar British
writing with reference to what had come before (The British Poetry
Revival) and by analogy with American Language Poetry of the previous
decade(: I seemed to be speaking of the work collected in Floating Capital
and others'). Indeed I was at pains to point out was the uniqueness of
that work, but I felt unable to (again) trot out versions of a moveable
poetics which I'd aired too often before. In fact, I wanted to hide behind a
comparative aspect for the sake of some clarities. I also wanted for the
sake of teh broad brush strokes use terms like Lang Po as short hand. I
ackwoledge Marjorie's point about the current state of that "grouping"
(that is not one, as it were), but such thumbnails are excuseable, I hope.
Glad you liked the piece by Lawrence, Jennifer and Bob. Do explore that
area more, of what Lawrence does not want to call concrete poetry,
and, of course, (loose words on my part) does not want to call hybrid _
although I think I still do, because I recognise a hybridity of reading and
performance conventions. Hybrids are new whole, as it were.
Robert.
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