> The only cultural cooridnate availbale for
> > Michael Rosen::: Ginsberg
> - perhaps not so innapropriate in the case of The Book Of Demons where
> there is a certain amount of early-Ginsberg-esque rant. I guess that's
> kind of praise, I like a good Howl as much as anyone, but I can't help
> feeling it's a bit too close to literary/cultural genre, unlike most of
> BM's other work, which finds its own way blow-by-singular-blow. If I'm
> right in this (and I look forward to being corrected) it's typical that
> the Poetry Book Society should reccommend this genre title, having
> studiously ignored the previous c.30yrs work.
>
> BOD does at least reprint Pearl, which I'll enthuse on separately if
> anyone wants...
>
Yes please. Re BOD, it is unclear to me what you mean by "this genre
title" or "literary/cultural genre", could you explain?
Is there not a Romantic dialectic between Pearl and BOD? "Pearl" seems
prelapsarian, not just the pastoral it generously writes
("Skybrightness drove me to the cool of the lake/ to muscle the wind/and
wrestle the clouds/ and forever dream of Pearl") but the figure of
Pearl herself who, in the condition of having no articulated verbal
language, is also inextricably part of that idyll, indeed, unfallen
("what there is of my mind/tumbled into the lashing trees")? Only the
lyric voice can mediate the being of Pearl. In BOD, bathetic urban
space, such as public lavatory, and ego full of swagger-lingo, as if it
were its own persuasive verbal pyrotechnics (cf. "christmas crackers"),
the very gift that enables sympathetic medation, that now drives it to
destruction? These are but the most initial and simple of comments. I
would like to hear what you made of it.
In Cambridge, MacSweeney read some recently written poems, which he
referred to as Pearl, Part II, where the 'Ewig-Weiblich' muse aspect,
though more sharply sexualised, is emphasised. Peter Riley asked Barry
MacSweeney what happened to Pearl (such is the power of the Pearl poem),
and she is alive and well and married to a strong taciturn farmer. Said
MacSweeney. I mention this because it is an interesting process too, a
poet's mythologisation.
About language poetry's emphasis on "the work". Lots of intellectual
labour ("the work") invested in language poetry, lots of emphasis on process,
critical reading and technique ("the work"), poesis ("the work"), yet no
one has mentioned one language poem as an instance of "the work".
Is language poetry a question, I wonder, of getting the work, or getting
work? I only ask because Stephen Rodefer wrote in "Four Lectures":
"Poetics is job application." And he ought to know.
Karlien
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