I'd like to go back to JW's mini-essay on JHP here, received yesterday.
>From early modernism onwards - Pound, Breton, MacDiarmid, etc. etc. -
we've got used to the idea of irreconcilable discourses cutting across one
another. This shows that modernism requires a grounding in an alterity
which is never entirely understood - modern societies are, after all,
directly post-colonial and postcolonial societies. There's also a kind of
humour in this cross-cutting and the postposement of any final absorption
of or by any one discourse.
What I'm failing to understand here is the compulsion to talk about this
aspect of modernism wholly with reference to Prynne. If we're to talk
about Prynne, I'd rather read about the changes which occurred between
high modernism and his late, 'English L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E' tendencies, with
some hints about how to read him this way. Techniques for reading, not the
theoretical truism that meaning 'emerges' and speakers can wear different
discourses.
If conversation always gravitates back to JHP, can we have a bit of
justification? The serious point here is that early modernism in its
ultra-canonized (and ultra-metropolitan) version - Eliot/ Pound - used its
poetics of irreconcilable discourses to enable an entire critical
industry, which became New Criticism. Instead of ever explaining
why certain writers should be discussed they evolved a circular idea of
a Great Tradition, and a critical subject-matter of laboriously
unpacking the supposedly specialist discourses which we're still rather
credulously referring to in JHP. (In Scotland, MacDiarmid has an even
dodgier idea of 'knowledge', and the decades of hero-worship and
unpacking of an infinite amount of wafer-thin learning, crippled
mid-century Scottish poetry).
This is happening in the same place as New Criticism, for Christ's sake.
I'm not sure I understand the political differences any more.
Not an anti-Cambridge attack. I speak as someone who's been highly charged
by JHP's work, and many of the others of A Various Art who are in danger
of being forgotten (and by JW's, in fact). Any of the hardcore
Cambrocentrists to write a bit more about Veronica Forrest-T for example?
Anyone with the vision to close this group's gap between JHP and other
serious British poetries?
Michael Gardiner
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|