>My underlying point, however, is that internationalism is a very shaky
>achievement in the modern world. It hasn't held up so far at any political
>level where issues that really matter to nations are involved: then, the old
>chauvinist bickering restarts. The recent Birmingham summit dismissal of the
>admittedly delicate rescheduling of African debts is a particularly poignant
>case. I don't believe poetry has solved this or that we are yet ready to talk
>in more than vague terms about the disappearance of an essentially British
>poetry. I get worried when the criteria for judging British poetry turn out
>to be set in the US and then borrowed back by British poets -- my worry is not
>for chauvinist reasons, but because there's more mutual opacity between
>cultures than is often recognised. I hope to be the opposite of chauvinist,
>actually, am a lifelong fan of US poetry, have had at least as much contact
>with it as most of my peers, and for many reasons haven't lived in Britain
>since 1982.
>
Much to agree with here. But internationalism in poetry and literary
criticism exists at some remove from internationalism involving economic
and political realities, it seems to me. In discourse concerning poetry and
in poetry itself one might seek to lead rather than to follow, even as
those same economic and political realities will inevitably reassert
themselves, not least for instance in the mechanics of publication and
distribution that help keep a good deal of British poetry invisible and
unknown in the United States. (There are of course other reasons for this
invisibility.) An internationalist rhetoric does not negate the need to
engage the local in all of its pluralities and to assert differences in
contexts and practices/traditions. One might acknowledge the temptations
toward and histories of such elisions and totalizations and acts of
imperial blundering as have occurred and continue to occur in the name of
internationalism. (Often a mere connoiseurship, Charles Bernstein has
noted.) I can't agree with Douglas more, then, when he insists that we
acknowledge mutual opacities, but I'd want to add that important affinities
and dialogue also exist and they should be acknowledged and encouraged as
well. (Douglas's own example is noteworthy, among many others') The recent
difficulty of speaking of British poetry in or from the United States is
something I have written about in various places, most extensively in a
book forthcoming next fall from Northwestern UP. (Please excuse the
self-promotion, but it will make my publisher happy and this seems the
right moment.) And in a number of places Robert Sheppard (among others)
has discussed the anxieties and difficulties and necessities of
contextualizing and speaking a British difference.
Because it's hard for USAmericans not to read British poets through
specific lenses, however broadly these are informed by global reading,
what's needed are more multinational forums (such as Romana Huk's
conference some years ago) and journals. That's obvious. I guess I'd also
like to argue for a more sophisticated and self-consciously organized and
collective internationalist rhetoric, partly or altogether in advance of
as-yet-unimaginable internationalist practices. I think that such a
rhetoric is necessary not only in Britain, where it might counter specific
and powerful constructions of an essential Englishness, but in the United
States as well. Here the study and practice of poetry, even in an era of
multiculturalism, is still in many ways powerfully organized by the sign of
nation. Nation is the given; the study of internationalism and
globalization is in its infancy, dominated on the one hand by optimism
concerning the Internet and on the other by nightmarish discourse
concerning homogenization, neither scenario being very convincing to those
who have begun to think some of the issues through but typical among
poets--or so it seems to me.
Blah blah blah. Obviously a rhetoric of internationalism, here or there,
need not be the only tactic for contesting reified or limiting traditions;
certainly the Bloodaxe New Gen anthology has as one of its virtues (for me)
a provocative challenge to a centered and reified, post-Movement
Englishness. At the same time one of its weaknesses is considerable
ignorance of international poetries. (If you doubt this, look at the
Poetry Review New Gen issue, where New Gen poets are asked what American
poets they read. There's one or two references to Frank O'Hara as I
recall, and W. N. Herbert mentions the langpos, but other than that
American poetry is still almost entirely Lowell, Berryman, Bishop, and Bob
Dylan.)
There is nothing which keeps so-called avant-garde practices from being
taken up into a discourse of Englishness or Americanness. Indeed many
avant-garde histories have nationalist moments and tendencies; take a look
at Wyndham Lewis's BLAST for instance. Clive Bush's recent book on Eric
Mottram, Allen Fisher, Bill Griffifths, etc. testifies to this in several
places also when these poets are spoken of as having "absorbed" and then
"transcended" American models as he locates them within traditions of
dissent going back through Blake and to the Levellers, etc. There's a way
in which I admire this effort on Bush's part, or to take a different
example the pastoralism of some of Peter Riley's work. It's always a
matter of how far and for what purposes and occasions one wants to
celebrate the indigenous over and against the "international."
It's not true, by the way, as was suggested in an earlier post, that Glyn
Maxwell, Simon Armitage, Don Paterson and others are unknown to the
"internationals" on this list. They are in general better known in the
United States than most of the oldsters who were defamed in that same post,
which is not to say that they are very well known. And as for youngsters,
how about Miles Champion? Is Maggie O'Sullivan "old"? Caroline Bergvall?
Geraldine Monk? How old is Jean Binta Breeze?
still brain-dead,
Keith Tuma
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