Hi Ken,
these oh so persistent ghosts that haunt us.
Re:
>Mottram's lurking aesthetic authoritarianism posed a problem for me - I say
>this as a committed friend, student and supporter. And the question of
>whether the Poetry Society faction of the mid-1970s made tactical errors in
>dealing with the Arts Council et al, refusing to compromise etc, is not one
>I want to resurrect (I seem to remember Peter Riley had quite a lot to say
>about it on this mailing list a few months back). But I seriously wish they
>hadn't lost. What we have NOW in poetry certainly seems like "the total
>exclusion of contrary points of view".
I know of perhaps nobody who knew and liked Eric that didn't have SERIOUS
run ins with him at some time or another. He'd make highly opinionated
judgemental statements and expect loyalty from those within earshot. My
sense was that his experience of the Poetry Society and Poetry Review
debacles (it was at times a viciously personal attack on his editorial
taste) made him more embittered, combative and irascible.
Speaking once again as a young and green poet with little finesse for
funding diplomacies and having been in at the kill, as it were (very much
the hunted), compromises were made and more blood was bayed for. I remember
Lee Harwood, bless 'im, thinking that there could a 'gentlemen's agreement'
with Osborne and the Arts Council (and in the end the House of Lords
representative).
It is true, that much was effectively lost and a brush constructed with
which to tar many others otherwise no more than indirectly implicated. In
that sense it was a tragedy (and I do not use the word ill-advisedly) for
English Poetry. Would that the breadth of taste which Anthony Frazier
argues for were being shown now by what is effectively and unfortunately
still 'the other side'. Even more peculiar in that these positions are held
by poets from more recent generations. WHere is the pluralism in Poetry
Review now? Is the situation one iota 'better'? I think not.
If those who brought a radical pluralism to poetics at the Poetry Society
in the first half of the nineteen seventies (for a pluralism it largely
was) are to held responsible for the immanent divides that bane us still
today, then so be it.
But some of us, aren't we, are trying to drive new alliances. to eek out
fresh possibilities.
love and love
cris
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