Since there has been no response yet to this posting I'd lilke to pick
up on the observation which closes it, on the elegiac quality of some of
the most striking works in British innovative poetry. I'd add Crozier's
The Veil Poem and Free Running Bitch, as well as noting the elegiac
strain in Prynne, especially diurnal sequences such as Into The Day. Not
to mention 50%+ of MacSweeney. These readers are absolutely onto
something.
Whilst Karlien is likely to note - and rightly, says he hastily - the
historical and sociological determinants of such a British twilight,
there's also an association with modernist aesthetics. J M Bernstein's
The Fate of Art is an extended meditation on the work of mourning which
is modernism, mourning the diremption of art and truth (c/f Gillian
Rose's writing).
The contrast with Language Poetry is remarkable. I wonder if there isn't
a categorical distinction still tenable between modernist lyric and
epic, with very crudely the British work cited descending from lyric and
the American descending from epic? (Is the sequence form an effort to
heal this distinction?)
This muttering leads to the question of what a post-aesthetic poetry
would look like; one which several contributors to this group respond to
in their work. Would one marker be the absence of the elegiac?
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