On Tue, 10 Nov 1998 14:09:12 -0500, Ken wrote:
> What we have NOW in poetry certainly seems like "the total
>exclusion of contrary points of view".
- and anyone who doubts this should check out the "Penguin Book of
Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945" ed Armitage and Crawford.
There's much that's good, interesting etc in it and I would like to be
able to welcome it - say, hey, it's just their choice y'know - and
move on. But it claims more than that: it claims "to survey the poetry
from Britain and Ireland published in the half century after the
Second World War".
Such a "survey" must obviously make hard choices, and I wouldn't seek
to criticise it for individual names included or left out. But what
one can't escape is the extent to which the omissions are covertly
partisan. It's nice to see Bunting, Jones and MacDiarmid represented
in the early part of the anthology - but hardly surprising that the
editors find these "seem something of an isolated, if exciting,
outcrop" since they've ruthlessly excluded in their entirety the seams
which are in any way connected to them. The effect is to produce an
anthology where Edwin Muir and Stevie Smith (and of course Auden and
co) are made to appear the presiding genii of the period. I believe
this to be a distortion on the part of these poet/academic editors,
and one which their students will not thanks them for.
A whole generation which emerged from the sixties onwards has been
landscaped out to produce this effect. There is:
- no "Cambridge poetry" however you define it
- no Fulcrum/Trigram/Goliard/Migrant poetry (except for three pages of
Roy Fisher)
- no "Out of Everywhere" (ok - half a page of Denise Riley)
- no sound poetry (and visual poetry is reduced to one poem of Edwin
Morgan's and some rather poorly reproduced Ian Hamilton Finlay)
- definately no Mottramistas or Sinclairanos
- no hint of the impact of American poetry on UK poetry during this
period
- nothing (other than the aforementioned Finlay) which would remotely
be associated with a term such as "experimental"
This seems to me to constitute a serious failure in something which
sets out to "survey". They could have made excuses for their
preferences in their introduction, but they didn't. All this work just
isn't worth mentioning. This, to me, leans towards the "exclusion of
contrary points of view" which Ken refers to.
Hence, of course, OTHER - you wouldn't expect me not to mention it.
There are 141 poets in Armitage and Crawford; 55 in Caddel and
Quartermain, and an overlap of just eight - Fisher R, Riley D,
Leonard, Agard, Nicholls, Johnson LK, D'Aguiar, and Zephaniah
(something scarey and worrying about the last area of overlap). I'd
been having all sorts of qualms about it - it's a small selection, it
can hardly cover the field it sets out to, there's so much more we
could've done, and was it right anyway to produce such an overtly
partisan reading? Well thanks, Armitage and Crawford, you've made me
feel ok about it, just sorry we couldn't do more.
RC
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|