Thanks to Pete for his big generous list, and his nagging away at what
remains an important, unanswered question from Jorge: here's an extra
dollop:
On Mon, 14 Sep 1998, Pete Smith & Lyn Richards Wool wrote:
> Basil Bunting: "Chomei at Toyama" Bunting's poetic reworking of a
> Chinese historical journal.
- Bunting also, of course, adopts different persona, as voices, or a
tutelary personages, or as narrative threads, in Briggflatts: Bloodaxe,
Alexander, Aneurin, Cuthbert... they all serve the same purpose - to
relate to that central and controlling "I", to hide or distance the
authorial "I" which Bunting comentators find so notoriously hard to
identify in a poet for whom "disguise" is a returning motif. Cloaking
devices, or devices to distance the self from the work. People who knew
him in old age forget he was thirty when he wrote Chomei, it's no
autobiography. Briggflatts, the only _life_ he wanted, is "An
Autobiography, but not a record of fact [...] The truth of the poem is of
another kind."
I think of the objectivists as a whole as distancing themselves from
autobiographical (Carl Rakosi has a racing news poem to the effect of
"Autobiography won by a nose - that's a lot of horse") but being far from
impersonal in a literal sense - an "I" who is obviously the poet walks
through Reznikoff, Rakosi and Oppen, and a framework of family and real
relationships make the known world in which Zukofsky ("To My Washstand")
acts. Truth of another kind, for sure, an "objective". And at a different
level those fake poets - Ern Malley et al - would be only mildly
interesting as phenomena of literary life - but that from time to time
(and Ern Malley is a case in point) the fakers might drop in a "truth ...
of another kind" and the whole thing fires up again, moves from schoolboy
prank to real event.
But it's more than just an "I"-count job: some time back when someone
(Robin?) on this list compared one of my poems to Heaney's I reacted
(rather too strongly, perhaps) to distinuish between - as I see it - the
engorged-ego-syndrome of that specific Irish poet, and my own avoidance of
1st pers. sing. Point being, I think, that although (I hope) there's a
clear authorial presence in what I write, it isn't (I hope) the basic
mechanics of it, the truth is of another kind. I hope.
Less than conclusive, huh? Hopefully it will prompt Jorge to come back and
say, Oh No, that's not what I meant at all, and to tell us how his work's
going.
RC
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