Trevor Joyce writes in reply to Keith Tuma:
>Thanks for the report, Keith, though it's scarcely news. The same EL has
>been trying, with fair success, to block every favourable assessment of
>our work for many years now. (Take that provisional 'our' to cover,
>roughly, the group assembled twice now at the Cork Conference: Geoff
>Squires, Michael Smith, Catherine Walsh, Billy Mills, Maurice Scully,
>Randolph Healy and myself, with David Lloyd in Berkeley as an outlier she
>doesn't think it worth sniping at, as yet.) When, about seven years back,
>Jim Mays submitted the only article yet in a mainstream journal to
>identify this body of work , EL tried first to stop it, and then insisted
>on getting in a counterswipe. Since she was poetry editor of the journal
>in question (The Irish Review), I suppose we were lucky to get away even
>with that.
>
A minor point, mainly for TJ: As I have had the dubious honour of being one
of EL's targets (at both the London conference on Anglo-American poetry and
at the Yeats summer school a couple of years back), TJ may be pleased to
know that I managed to get a review of his Syzygy past EL, for inclusion in
the next issue of the IRISH REVIEW, which is happily back in Cork after
several years in EL's Belfast.
TJ continues:
>Part of my concern about Other (sorry, Doug, if this strikes you as a
>purely 'negative discussion' - I think it's a broad point, worth making)
>is that it may make it simpler for EL & the acolytes to see 'experiment'
>as an anomaly within Irish poetry, as something merely imported from
>America or the UK on an ad hoc basis, without any continuous presence
>here. Ric and Peter's only inclusion before Walsh/Mills/Scully/Healy is
>Brian Coffey, who lived from the fifties (?) in the US and England. So,
>one might ask, was there nothing new happening within Ireland for the
>last forty years until this late manifestation? Was everything here a
>mere outcrop of The Movement? There was, and it wasn't, but I'm afraid
>Other might lead one to think otherwise, and I hate to see life made
>easier for the likes of Edna L.
This is bang-on, though one needs to take care not to play into EL's hands
by suggesting there is an easily-defined "Tradition" of modernist poetry in
Ireland. At the Anglo-American conf at UCL, Edna seemed surprised at my
own reading of innovative Irish poetry as a varied/variegated phenomenon,
as opposed to a cohesive counter-voice to an equally spurious "mainstream"
tradition. It plays the ball straight to a formidable (and gifted) critic
like EL to construct a monolithic counter-culture. Instead, it may be
wilier, and is certainly more honest, to note connections between, say,
Catherine Walsh and Austin Clarke, rather than creating a modernist poetic
passed, like a baton, from MacGreevy to Beckett/Devlin/Coffey to New
Writers' Press to Catherine Walsh/Randolph Healy/Maurice Scully/Billy
Mills. There is indeed a rich prehistory to contemporary innovative poetry
in Ireland, but it is also a tangled skein. The problem with OTHER, as TJ
notes, is that it apparently fails to register the texture of this skein:
to take just two examples, the failure to include TJ is unaccountable,
while there was surely space for Geoffrey Squires, one of the most gifted
poets of his generation. Don't get me wrong: I am looking forward to OTHER
appearing and hope that it will have an impact in the US. That said, it
presents a very different "view of the present state of Ireland" than the
one I see from Cork.
Alex Davis
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