I merely made a mild objection to the assumption of a term like
Quality-control in the field of contemporary poetry. I didnt say any of
those other things and I didn't tell anyone to Fuck Off and I'm no admirer
of Oscar Wilde. Not the idea of quality but the assumption of its
accessibility. Viz you say we need quality control and we need to discuss
different poets, OK, but then you name a number of poets some of whom
happen to be of no interest to me whatsoever so what has happened to the
Quality concept? It has become "your" quality. Of course you've got to
have your quality, I'm just saying it's not My quality and it's certainly
not Our quality. Whenever anyone mentions "Standards" I immediately think
of F.R.Leavis and how little things change.
We surely all do our best, but people who set up Standards and Quality
Control are often engaged in trying to convert the world to their own
preferences. This has always been my objection to Andrew Duncan's
enterprise, worthy as it is in many ways. His list of 100 Best Poetry Books
was the last straw. We were back to the world not of FR Leavis but of WH
Smith.
Surely the location of quality has to be set at a very high pitch? It has
to transcend (rather than ignore) the fact that poetry as it is now
practised attaches itself to people's psychic landscapes very variously,
and tentative, scrupulous acts of trust are the only mechanisms I know
for setting up quality claims.
I'm particularly mistrustful of the lionisation of parental Great Poets.
the burning of candles to monolithic saintly poet figures who can do no
wrong and are exemplary in their meanest scribblings or even beyond their
writing capacities altogether. This goes on a lot on the left of the scene,
perhaps for obvious reasons, and needs to be discussed, I think. It could
be a dangerous indulgence which makes the continued creation of poetry all
the more difficult.
David Kennedy's essay answers the question of value in relation to what
people will buy as "poetry". and it would be silly to claim against it that
alternative poetries are not also markets. But it sidesteps the question of
kinds and qualities of value., i.e., whether the value you can create
comercially can be anything other than commercial value. So that the
"democratic" input could very easily be a blind. I remain unsure about
this. But the essay does seem to end in mid-sentence -- like yes, all that
goes on--- but so what? So we should rejoice in the nation's new
Thatcher-Labour poetical industry? So we should recoil in horror? So we
should accept that this is what "the poeple" want as poetry and give up our
trade in dead-end unsellables? So we should emigrate to Australia?
I seem to be very late in this discussion -- people must be accessing the
list and answering each other in the middle of the night and next morning
the mailing you want to reply to already has six responses attached to it.
///PR
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