Interesting remark of Bob Cobbing's that people are supporting particular
poets not poetry, an observation that takes us beyond the question of
the reading/performance of poetry.
What does this phenomenon mean that certain readers only pitch up for
certain readers?
Clearly it is an effect of the consolidation of certain relationships in our
alternative poetries and it results in poets of the 50s being beigger than
those of the sixties and so on.....................
But while it is an understandable bi-product of critical consolidation
(official and unofficial) it could result in the exclusion of younger voices
(younger than myself I mean), that they are condemned to never getting
their work aired. (I rememeber that from the early eighties.)
And, of course, older "voices" will be marginalised, until "rediscovered"
with the kind of hype that NJ entertains and which has been criticised
here.
The reading is the visible side of this; what happens in reading
magazines. Do these readers filter out writers they don't recognise? I
think it might be so, as the years get shorter and the sight gets longer.
(My critical work, say my essay on the 6os, or even Pages helped this
process. BUT going through the old first series of Pages, 87 - 90 I am
amazed at the range of work I published.)
What is needed is a blanket commitment to poetry as an institiution, which
need not mean a meaningless catholic attitude to the necessary divisions
of poetics.
(that's another story....................................
Robert
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