I'm right behind what Doug says about there needing to be an entity
ie British poetry, to have and lose its borders, though I'm not sure
it has anything to do with the fact that we both grew up within a
mile or so of one another, though at a slightly different time, and,
locality being what it is, mutually unknown. I'm also sure that to be
a Scottish poet is not quite the same as being an English poet (only
the one owns its name for one thing), but they might both be ways
of belonging less inertly to poetries in English. Residues not only
interpret or limit horizons, perhaps they also receive them,
welcome them, or have something by which they might be changed.
And locality as such ought to be a matter of care to where one is
arriving, it may even have remembered you in advance of itself.
I've been reading Martin Corless-Smith's Piscator ( a poet a good
deal younger than me) with a lot of interest, and seems to have a
language that has been places, is both grateful for, and grates out
its echoes. The distance between Worcestershire and Salt lake
isn't spanned by empties in good international order.Good to be able
to hear Christopher Smart and folk poetry and song, an innovatory
music rather than strategy which seems
closer to Zanzotto than Prynne. A less eerily thickened poem that
might travel better over the net and which I like a lot is:
Dear harmless span
day wakes mean hiding
from such a valley full
of human
Dear despairing mass
creep to the shade only
the green is no trespass
Peter
Peter Larkin
Philosophy & Literature Librarian
University of Warwick Library
Coventry CV4 7AL UK
Tel: 01203 528151 Fax: 01203 524211
Email: [log in to unmask]
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