>You might be amused to hear that in her talk at the Anglo-American pow wow
>in London Edna Longley went on for nearly an hour hacking away at Pound and
>Poundians for writing Yeats out of modernism. Apparently, Pound equals
>"America" and it's Americans to blame for putting over a completely
>worthless poetic on the world. When she was done, I asked her about the
>existence of an "other" Irish poetry coming out of Brian Coffey etc. and
>moving up into the present with folks like yourself, Catherine Walsh,
>Maurice Scully, etc. One sentence in her reply I'll treasure always:
>"These people are confused."
Thanks for the report, Keith, though it's scarcely news. The same EL has
been trying, with fair success, to block every favourable assessment of
our work for many years now. (Take that provisional 'our' to cover,
roughly, the group assembled twice now at the Cork Conference: Geoff
Squires, Michael Smith, Catherine Walsh, Billy Mills, Maurice Scully,
Randolph Healy and myself, with David Lloyd in Berkeley as an outlier she
doesn't think it worth sniping at, as yet.) When, about seven years back,
Jim Mays submitted the only article yet in a mainstream journal to
identify this body of work , EL tried first to stop it, and then insisted
on getting in a counterswipe. Since she was poetry editor of the journal
in question (The Irish Review), I suppose we were lucky to get away even
with that.
Part of my concern about Other (sorry, Doug, if this strikes you as a
purely 'negative discussion' - I think it's a broad point, worth making)
is that it may make it simpler for EL & the acolytes to see 'experiment'
as an anomaly within Irish poetry, as something merely imported from
America or the UK on an ad hoc basis, without any continuous presence
here. Ric and Peter's only inclusion before Walsh/Mills/Scully/Healy is
Brian Coffey, who lived from the fifties (?) in the US and England. So,
one might ask, was there nothing new happening within Ireland for the
last forty years until this late manifestation? Was everything here a
mere outcrop of The Movement? There was, and it wasn't, but I'm afraid
Other might lead one to think otherwise, and I hate to see life made
easier for the likes of Edna L.
Cheers,
Trevor
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Trevor Joyce
Apple Cork IS&T
Phone : +353-21-284405
EMail : [log in to unmask]
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