Bill Griffiths misreads me quite largely, because he seems to think I share
Andrew Duncan's view of the poetry field. I have no sides in this, certainly
neither Cambridge nor London. I only seem to have because I intervened. I
certainly don't enlist Bill in any partial field, either Cambridge or London
or Chestertonian (?) or any other. I was asking that the debate now
concentrate on the issues and away from the person. I am very interested in
Bill's discussion of these larger matters -- the kind of discussion I have
been hoping for all along.

So I did not introduce the Cambridge-London business to invalidate any
discussion. Since I had a definite sense of such a dichotomy back in the
early 1970s and still see it influencing poetic preferences sometimes, I don't
believe it was invented by Andrew D in the 1980s. But I don't live in England:
it's easy for me to get things askew. If you'll allow, I'd rather not defend
my remarks any more (much, anyway!): I'll let Ric and Bill dismantle them --
really, that's fine by me, since I don't want the dichotomy anyway. I'll also
gladly acknowledge the open outlook of both of them, no problem.

Thatcher is another question, since I myself left England partly because of
the atmosphere that brought her to power. I had been tracking this atmosphere
since 1971-2 when I wrote a novel about it, and in fact prophesied her rise to
power.

Bill says: "The idea that poets fail to react to this (the socio-political
atmosphere) is incredible - we cannot help but know that our lives and
productions are shaped necessarily by and in such a context, if we live in
this country. But perhaps what is meant is that we have not made the correct
reaction...."

Don't know where he got that opening idea from: not from me. The main problem
I have with his posting is that he argues by misstating what I said, or by
treating me as somewhat Andrew Duncan's spokesperson (I have very different
ideas from Duncan and am in no sense a supporter of his) and then shooting at
the straw argument. The truth lies in Bill's last sentence, and then only
partly so: a response is being made, but the question, I shall argue, is very
difficult. For myself, I was opening a debate: I have not even begun to state
a personal position.

There's a way of looking at "history" which makes all distinctions disappear
-- "There never was a Renaissance", etc. -- I could easily make the
Renaissance seem a product of the medieval world. In this case, one should
not fetishise Margaret Thatcher, who was the nasty tip of deeper phenomena.
Nor should one make the post-Thatcher era disappear just because Blair has
apparently so little departed from it, not to mention the British public at
large. But if, because we can track a longer origin to everything, we're to
suppose poetic development a seamless web I'm not going to agree with Bill.
Everyone in Britain nowadays talks differently from the conversations I used
to have in the 1970s. They also talk differently from the conversations of
the 1980s. Here, I do have my only advantage on this: lacking much detail
that arises from daily living, I dive back into Britain at intervals and can
see the changes. As Bill says, how could any poet remain immune?

What are the forces which have changed the sense of public space since the
early 1970s? I am driven on to a set of clichés. First, the rise of
information technology and its symbiotic relationship with the globalisation
of money and politics. Next, the EU. The domination of the Third World by
American, European, and certain Asian financial interests. And so on through
an immensely complicated network of interrelated results, down to the rise of
arts administration as a culturally influential force, Murdoch's Thatcher-
Blair domination of media, the blanding out of socialism -- well, I'd have to
give a whole historical survey, and include much on the international as well
as British scene. In these respects the 1990s differ importantly from the
1980s because of that neglected factor of change -- degree. When a change is
one of degree, a historical analysis can make it seem to disappear. But short
of convulsive revolutionary-like change, degree is one of the most important
kinds of change.

Bill says: "Under the second general heading of Thatcherism, I query that
there is a post-Thatcherist era at all. We are still living, as far as my
observation goes, with all the unpleasant assumptions of the Mother Goddess:
That is, a sort of chaoticist and pseudo-Darwinian individualism and
competitiveness that denies any assessment apart from a material one...."

I accept much of Bill's approach here, but not all of it -- question of degree
again. The blandness of the Blair era, his sucking up to Clinton, and his
awareness that an appeal back to Thatcherism is an electoral winner tend to
disguise the changes that are beginning to take place. The blanding out of
socialism has been one of them. I don't say desirable changes. The rise of
information technology, for example, started during Thatcher (so it
"disappears" as a Blair-era phenomenon) But it has increased exponentially.
On the tiny scale, it may have given a spur to renewed British interest among
the young in certain aspects of Langpo, aspects which can be tracked back to
the 1960s if we take that path -- dunno, really. Current poetic interest in
electronic forms is another response.

I can't cover this in an e-mail, a thesis as Bill says, and more. And I am
agreeing that poets are being responsive to the changes. But it is not true,
I think, that poets have found how to be fully responsive to the distancing of
politics from our everyday lives or to the competitiveness Bill speaks of. I
am a great admirer of Bill's poetry, or Allen F's, of Denise Riley's, and
let's not even mention Prynne's intense manner of awareness. These are ways
to go. I am fond of John Kinsella's eruption on to the British scene and the
Australianness it has introduced. And so on. The catch is "fully", because
"fully" is impossible. I am daily aware that in my own poetry I have not yet
discovered fully how to occupy the necessary public spaces of poetic activity.
I am responsive, but how to be so fully, that's the great unanswerable.

In this, I do share Bill's distaste for academic critical terminology: it has
no place in the way poets should talk. But he seems to feel sniped at by me.
No! No! No!

"Less I be condemned with the same negative brush, let me say I do
have a positive view of the arts: simply, that the human is infinite,
and can be the source of any amount of new ideas, new environments,
new concepts of what the human can be and experience. I am not keen
on using historical jargon or critical writing or verse itself, to
limit what a human might be or demonstrate what a human should be. I
find it hard to empathise with those who are trying to stop
new writing going ahead and discredit any experimenting. History, of
course, can be used to create just such limiting concepts...."

Well, I was going to write a manifesto. Perhaps Bill has saved me the
trouble.


Doug



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