Obviously, there's much to comment on in this, but at present I'm only
picking up on one point:
"As the poet and critic Sean O'Brien notes:
Of course, the universality of language and the relative brevity of most
poetry give poetry an obvious appeal as a means of self-expression, but,
[...]
the prospect of many thousands of composers clamouring for publication
and performance of their symphonies would be absurd."
O'Brien's smart dismissal of all those hopeful "sunday symphonists" is
very much the voice of an established, "of-course-the-organs-of-selection
-don't-make-mistakes" critic, ignorant or chosing to appear ignorant of
all the examples when critics have done just that, excluded a Havergal
Brian over a sustained period of time for some reason or other. But behind
the statement also is the assumption that those who clamour must, de
facto, be composers of symphonies, because to produce work which doesn't
fit an existing niche is unthinkable (one remembers the RCM professors
fuming at Sharp's notation of folk song: "no peasant can think in compound
time"): what shall we say of those who clamour with works of a different
shape? Rejecting the approved central cultural forms, they present their
sunday work in - gasp - the wrong language!
And here we get to the major fault in O'Brien's statement, that sweeping
"Of course, the universality of language...". Do we really believe
language to be universal? When we're faced with the seeming omnipotence of
murdoch-speak or bbc-speak, do we for a moment make the mistake of
thinking that's all there is? I think not - Moravians reject the proffered
"universality" of Prague speech with all the vehemence that Glaswegians
reject London Newsreaderspeak. In the North East of England you can place
a speech to within a small area by inflection, sentence structure or
vocabulary. Put a group of librarians next to a group of, for instance,
taxidrivers and hear the different ways in which they use words - "file"
and "charge" would be obvious, but there are other areas of radical
difference, means of making distinctions of tone and meaning. John
Wilkinson on this list has relished earwigging the levels of language in
the conversation of the girls in front of him on the bus, and pointed out
the applicability of such richness to some poetry. In short, far from
being "universal" I'm happy to say that language is diverse, localised to
an extreme, and is busily being celebrated as such by most of the writers
I appreciate from John Clare to Rob McKenzie.
The thought that such writers in some way chose to be poets because of the
"obvious appeal as a means of self-expression" of some notional universal
language (?esperanto) is insulting to the range and depth of poetries
produced across the country, and shows the mindset of a critical approach
committed to keeping things nice 'n tight 'n narrow in a way that is in
sharp contrast to the efforts of many of the writers on this list. I'm
grateful to Peter Quartermain for the following quote, from Roger
Casement:
"The language of a people is the fortress which the enemy first assails,
and once that fortress is captured and its stones levelled with the
ground, every other stronghold of nationality must inevitably fall."
RC
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