Look folks, can we please calm down here. A very mild and even worthy
statement by one contributor that he does not like somebody's work is no
need to jump down his neck. I know very little of the work in question, and
will thus forbear comment other than to say that Ms Brady's work is of
sufficient difficulty that plenty of readers will have some kind of problem
with it. The reader in question should be permitted to air his views, just
as others, such as Keston, should be permitted to defend it so that we ALL
get a better understanding of what the work is all about.
Likewise Douglas should be allowed to say that he thinks a book is bad: I
think we all understand that he meant that he himself thought it bad, not
that he was assuming ownership of the rights to classify certain poems/poets
in a universal league table.
Lawrence, your response was fair enough in the circumstances, but you can't
condemn someone for over-generalisation (which was indeed the case - if a
very common one) and then implicitly damn everyone from the Home Counties. I
actually know what you mean, as I did in Douglas's case, but Anthony Barnett
and Lee Harwood are both Home Counties poets and letter-writers too. We
would not toss them in with the tweed-jacketed lovers of Edna St Vincent
Millay that I think you mean, would we?
So, please, everyone, a little more patience with the off-the-cuff utterings
of e-mail. Let a thousand flowers bloom and let the folks say their piece.
Get in there and defend the work that's attacked if you can help us
understand it, but don't let's get bogged down in pointless slanging matches
that add nothing to the process. Let's try to understand first what the
e-mailers are trying to say - otherwise we get that desperate situation
where the US drops a second A-bomb on Japan because they couldn't understand
the Japanese telegraph response to the first one. (And before you all jump,
I know that's at least partly apocryphal, but it makes the point.)
I was at Buckfastleigh for the last two nights by the way but I missed the
afternoon reading that Douglas experienced, though I did hear from others
that Fred Beake's reading was something special. I reckon I profited by
attending the festival, though not in ways that I had expected. Readings are
often a mixed bag, and these were in that vein - some good, some poor. The
best of it for me was that Meg Bateman (not a post-modernist, or even a
modernist), to whose work I had previously paid little attention, came over
as well worth further pursuit. My prejudices in advance of the reading would
have put her much further down the list of attractions. A convert? Not
quite, but I'm reading her, and I wasn't doing that two days ago. The only
catch is that the poems sounded better in Gaelic, and I reckon the English
translations over-domesticated them sound-wise. I could of course be very
wrong, as I can't understand a single word of Gaelic, but that was the
impression ....
Tony Frazer
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|