Thanks to all who have contributed to the very interesting ‘purple’
discussion.

Note that I didn’t mean to tar Brady with a Morrison brush; Brady is
clearly doing something more sophisticated.  I did sort of have Pound in
mind (I must confess to being one of those unfortunates, like Jackson
Mac Low and William Cookson, who were ruined by Ez at an impressionable
age) when adverting to early modernism.  With regard to the Steve Evans
circle, I wouldn’t equate lyricism with purpleness; rather ‘plain’ texts
can be quite lyrical.

I remain curious about the coordinates of the Brady/Wilkinson approach
(please append other authors as appropriate) in textual space.  Who are
its honoured predecessors (‘anticipatory plagiarists’ in Oulipese)?
What is it reacting against?  Why does it invoke archaism and flirt with
what might appear at first sight to be a mannered pretentiousness so
readily?  What makes it specially relevant in our present circumstances?

(As I read and re-read the bit of Brady that I quoted, it looks less and
less purple and I find myself liking it better.  When a number of
intelligent people appreciate something that I haven’t managed yet to
appreciate, I am willing to entertain the possibility that I may be
suffering from an ‘aspect blindness’.  Who knows, I may even be
educable.)

Keston’s remarks on his greater aversion to a pullulation of objects
(shades of Quine and his ontological desert landscapes) than to a
voluptuousness of word and syntax are very intriguing, but I am
confused.  What sort of object is meant here?

Billy’s remarks about the straightjacket of the SVO sentence are also
interesting, but it seems to me that the really big difference between
him and Brady is that he has  seriously assimilated figures like Pound,
Bunting, Zukofsky, Coffey, and practises a minimalist ‘dichten =
condensare’ discipline, while these figures seem hardly to have existed
for Brady/Wilkinson, who practise more of a ‘dicht = baroque’ aesthetic
(with predecessors Hopkins? Stevens? St-John Perse?  some
surrealists?).  If I am all wet here, I’m sure someone will set me
straight.

The only poems by Billy I have lying to hand (until I place my order
with Peter after his Aussie rustication) are those in Other and Angel
Exhaust.  I must say that for the most part the syntagmata in these
poems are clearly recognisable English ones (there is some permutative
play which doesn’t strike me as radically disjunctive—which is fine).
Having recently read Saussure, I find his notion of syntagma too simple
to be of any theoretical use (basically syntagma = significant
concatenation, with the ‘significant’ part wholly unexplained by
Saussure, leaving us with bare concatenation).  But maybe it can
stimulate some good poetry.

Regards to all.




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