Douglas: I think you're misrepresenting Rob Sheppard's book (I assume we're
talking about _Far Language_?). Sure, it's dismissive of the Movement, and
argues for the aesthetic distance between the poets he champions & Movement
poetry: but from a quick scan I can't discover a passage where he claims
that "postmodern" (let's leave that term stand for a sec) poetry is written
purely with the _intention_ of being unintelligible to the ordinary reader.
That's an entirely different thing from being _in fact_ unintelligible to
the ordinary reader, and is such a trivial motivation for the creation of
an artwork that I find it hard to ascribe to any of the writers discussed
in Sheppard's book. One might quote a passage from p.32, from a review of
Harwood, Raworth & Roy Fisher:
"When a comprehensive literary history of late twentieth-century British
poetry is undertaken, it will have to take account of various writers who
have not conformed to the still dominant norms offered by the Movement.
Roy Fisher, Lee Harwood and Tom Raworth have all refused the orthodoxy;
each has a commitment to a poetry that emphasizes its own procedures, which
explores reality in language, rather than through it. Writing, for them,
need not be tied to realism or social perspectives; to varying degrees,
they have felt obliged to break the paradigms that generally define what
poetry will be, and have not been afraid to assimilate European and
American modernism."
In general, I think it true to say that writers don't have in mind some
"ordinary reader" when writing--and this goes for many different poetic
styles. They've been excited or intrigued by particular things they've
read & aesthetic approaches they've encountered, they've got something to
say, they want to write something they'd like to read, they have some
friends who might like it too. Does "the ordinary reader" really come into
play here until fairly late in the game (book sales, fame, etc.)? I'd hope
that poets who write "accessible" poetry do so because they _like_ such
poetry, not because they feel constrained by the demands of an "ordinary
reader".
You are also wrong to merely identify Prynne's writing with that advocated
by Sheppard's book. The very first piece in the book is a
less-than-complimentary review of _Down where changed_ ("a tranquil, if
somewhat sterile, beauty").
all best
N
Nate & Jane Dorward
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109 Hounslow Ave., Willowdale, ON, M2N 2B1, Canada
ph: (416) 221 6865
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