Couldn't resist that last glovelet on the sheer thread. Have been away
with Ez. I had preferred Andrew Duncan's critical writing over his poetry
(though why I even presume that choice I am not sure); in the poetry (I
mean "Pauper Estate" and the stuff in Conductors of Chaos) a 19th-century
Darwinian Marxist determinism edification tone seems to resonate (though I
daresay it is meant to be the spirit of Foucault) labour force, images of
locks as in weirs, monkeys in cages, grid patterns, and so forth. Material
desirable objects, luxury commodities, are referred to, once, as "dear
books" and "fine clothes" and "fancy wines", dear & fine & fancy by me,
but those outmoded adjectives disavow the modishness that is inextricable
from the material 'heat-seeking' (going for the hot stuff) pleasures
of urban modernity, no mind the class. And therefore refuses to imagine it
as actual, or relevant (as a potential individual release from a class
system) to the immurable socio-political structures set out in the poetry
(which does not purchase into prosodic song-play).
This may be honest and it certainly is recalcitrant. But what is
interesting, actually (Ben Watson told me never to use that word), is that
whilst Duncan refuses to write this, I suppose, escapist clause, into his
poems, check out his reviews (tart though they may be),they are most
admiring of and yet (not-at-all-becky) sharp on the ephemeral fraught
luxuriousness of others' poems. (I am thinking particularly of the
excellent review of Grace Lake's "Bernache Nonette"). I am told he's not
acute (blunt) on concrete/performance poetry, etc., which I accept. Is it
not the other side of the same coin? Why separate out his poems from his
reviews as processed in different categories of intellectual labour, when
the interstice may be relevant to both?
Karlien
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