Karlien's principled criticism of Duncan's work is of a kind I like:  a
holding of the work up to account for what it implies.  Rigorous without being
hostile, able to concede that important questions are raised;

I'm not sure that I'd be "morally" in the clear about indifference towards
books and nice wine, though here in Paris we're content with anything that
gives us the text and are trying to downscale wine down to the 21F a bottle
mark.  What does strike me about Duncan's work is, first, the ferocious energy
that keeps kicking the rhythm alive along a long line that is truly flexible. 

Big flat dredge barges with their rusty towers
Grab the silt and gravel from the drowned ground;
Balky Amsterdam craft with pelican mouth, on stork legs.
The seagull's sweep is wider than the shear-tower's pivot.
The spark volley, from the welder's nozzle where he
Perches on a step thirty feet above the Thames, spreads . . .
                                           (Pauper Estate)

It's the Amsterdam line which sends the whole cadence into life, so that the
line about the seagull has that true Bunting cadence, and the "where he" is
expertly placed after "welder's nozzle".  That's the kind of thing I mean, and
you can find it throughout.

Second, as X and Y say in our latest Gare du Nord (due out this week, plug),
the fact that when you read a Duncan poem you recognise a kind of life
actually being lived in Britain.  There's a way of evasion that floats actual
facts of living off into abstractions where they are discreetly sanitised, and
Duncan, by and large, avoids that most subtle of temptations.  Look at the eye
being used above and seeing the real view along the Thames.  

Third.  It is easy to be politically enlightened if all you are talking about
is abstract terms, loosely tied at the foot into life process.  When I regard
the lives many poets live (please, I never exclude myself from such
generalisations) I do not see great political enlightenment in them: I see a
particular variant of academic life, complete with tenure and pensions.  This
is not to value, especially, a poverty-stricken existence (though, poetically,
that can in fact have a value sometimes), nor to denigrate those who keep the
craft alive from their varied social positions.  But in Duncan I find the life
actually lived, along with whatever political deficiencies that are correctly
pointed out by Karlien, reflected in the verse.  My big regret, as with Denise
Riley, is that he doesn't write more.  We need so badly in Britain (say I from
France) not to shoot ourselves in the foot but to borrow from the US that
bright energy that supports each other through very difficult times.

Alison Croggon asks whether there are only boys on the list and receives a
most peculiar reply from Anthony Lawrence, which leaves us all swaying in the
wind.  Sobeit.  

How would it be regarded if Alison's or another's comments on the hirsute
gents should/should not get up said gents noses? she asks.  It is difficult to
reply to that without getting unpleasant physical.  But what we need on our
list, in my opinion, is certainly some up-the-nose feminism. I shall buy some
nose spray.

Please look at my poetic bird, a moment, Ric, not some other poetic bird of
your own creation.   The two wings of poetry on the bird I was observing are
male and female; they make it fly.  

Catherine Bateson calls us to task for shelving the prose/poetry discussion
raised by Ernest Slyman.  I think, honestly, there's a division between two
kinds of reply, one of which doesn't really see a problem; and the other which
sees the problem as crucial.  Probably this is a false dichotomy:  the
question arises if it's important for you to define a difference; and it
simply doesn't if it isn't.

It's not terribly important to me, but I'd like to show goodwill and talk as
if it were.

If we're going to define poetry, for example, as something written in lines
(and blithely ignore all that poetry which isn't, all the way from the prose
or prosier poem to concrete poetry, performance, etc.) THEN, the question of
what poetry is will depend upon how ordered the repetitions of sound pattern
are within and between lines.  At least, so I'm opining for the moment.  This
complex ordering -- too complex for present discussion -- will actually
reflect a quasi-unity between sound/silence, emotional significance, and
intellectual-semantic significance.  (I'm simplifying, leaving out, for
example, intended and unintended wider allusions, socio-historical effects,
deliberate lack of closures, refusal of any lyric impulse whatsoever, and all
the rest of it: I'm just politely keeping to the question in the manner
posed.)  

The complexity of ordering means, for example, that the notion of a line
ending will be infinitely subtle -- often the actual sound, for example, will
continue over a line ending while yet the ear will hear the division take
place.  Within the line the relationship between stress, duration, and tone on
which most of the world's major prosodies are based is also extremely complex
-- again, almost infinitely subtle it seems.  Most discussions of these
questions lack full definition even of the key terms used, stress, duration,
etc.

If you try to codify this immensity of possible effect into a set metrics, as
in traditional English metres, what you do is make it easier for the reader to
perceive the quasi-unity of sound, emotional significance, and intellectual-
semantic significance, as before.  Often, this makes the verse more easily
appreciated and more easily memorable.  That is a plus.  The minus is that you
lose a lot of possible subtlety, and much of that is subtlety that poets like
even when the wider public is deaf to it (owing not to lack of intelligence
but to lack of ear training and perhaps of certain knowledges, especially
those concerning poetry's current preoccupations and past tradition).

Much of the dispute in poetry about prosody arises because people who have
clearly seen the benefits of traditional metres (which are real) refuse to
entertain the notion that they might be missing subtleties elsewhere in the
poetic craft.  And those who do go in for the freer forms, whose repetitions
are harder to hear since they are more buried, refuse to recognise that
traditional metres might have their own appeal -- after all, "isn't their lack
of subtlety boring," etc?

And so we have our present dilemma, perhaps.  A topic that interests the
traditionalists more than the freer-form people?  Is that an explanation for
why the glove thrown down was not picked up, Catherine?


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