I'm not sure where the application of Peter Riley's suggestion will get
us, other than to a kind of generalised defeatism, give up all attempts to
reach out, don't tell anyone anything cos they might not like it. It's
plainly a truism, a waste of a once fine mind, to observe that the
distances between some recently posted poems and the work of other poets
on the list is/are great - but to leap from that to saying that there
can't be exchange across such distances would be, to say the least,
saddening.
So, the distances between John Wilkinson (who hasn't posted any poems) and
some of the recent poem-posters on this list is great. But it doesn't even
begin to encompass the range of possibilities - in truth, if you look at
other poets around, the distances are probably *even greater than you
think*. As I've long suggested, you don't need a Cambridge education to
see that the range of poetries in this countries is great, and you'd have
to be psychotic to appreciate or care for them all. This list - which of
course has always set out *not* to be the list of any one group - *might*
become a place where a number of different approaches meet, indeed on some
occasions it has already had this effect, and the adverts for recent books
are generally considered useful (from feedback I've received). That's a
modest enough objective, and a long way from proposing "the notion of
Community of any kind in the Arts", but it's worth hanging onto.
It's when you stop trying that the awful atrophication happens: as it does
in the Mainstream: you recall, in a response to an earlier post of Peter's
I came up with:
> a working definition of hardcore "mainstream", along the lines of :
"that which is promoted by most cultural arbiters as the succession of
excellence in UK poetry" (please feel free to tinker with this, I really
don't mind). <
- and neither Peter nor anyone else argued. My contention is still that
you find more openness away from such a mainstream than in it, and, as a
general point, I'm concerned to keep this list to do with openness, even
if the confusing blasts of contrary poetries knocks some tired worriers
off their zimmers.
Where I agree with Peter is in preferring "accurate description of and
quotation from" to the use of impersonal rhetoric as general practice.
___________________________________________________________
Richard Caddel
Durham University Library, Stockton Rd., Durham DH1 3LY, UK
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Phone: +44 (0)191 374 3044 Fax: +44 (0)191 374 7481
WWW: http://www.dur.ac.uk/~dul0ric
"Words! Pens are too light. Take a chisel to write."
- Basil Bunting
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