Just back, after several days in bed, vomiting, nothing to do with poetry.
to find a lot of interesting stuff. Just wanted to answer a couple of points
here.

My 'self-satisfaction' was just a response to the message from Randolph that
led to mine.

People post saying they like somebody's work, but don't say why. No problem.

Others, not just me, post saying they don't. They're engaging in
unaccountability.

Nobody's ever going to like everything you do. The worst response is to
patronise them.

Enjoy yr. break

Billy

hardPressed poetry

Alternative Irish poetry publishing and distribution

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> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Temple [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Friday, October 22, 1999 5:01 PM
> To: british poets
> Subject: Purple people eaters / Maximus in Devon
>
>
> Big welcome back to the world of accountability to Billy,
> though not quite
> sure that the slight hint of self-satisfaction (unless I'm missing the
> twinkle in his eye!) over the Olson thread, piquantly
> accompanied by his
> readiness to deny Keston sole credit for the- temporary-
> Brady stand-off, is
> completely justified. On that subject & before it's
> absolutely too late, I'd
> just like to associate myself with Robert Kelly's moving &
> beautifully exact
> statement on Maximus lll, and by implication Alex Davis's &
> David Bromige's
> standpoint. My friendship with- respect for- Peter far too
> deep-rooted to be
> affected by disagreement at this or any future point. Still trying to
> account for my sense that Kelly's 'intercepter, not
> interpreter' (in line
> with 'projectile') does get us off certain hooks along the
> interpretation--exegesis axis and squaring this up to Robin Purves'
> brilliant (all usages) essay in Gig2 which I'm reading & on
> balance glad I
> hadn't read in August, while embarked on that discussion of 'Britain's
> leading late Modernist poet' (don't mention The War!), or my
> 'fools rush in'
> strategy would have been seriously slowed down: "The point,
> if it _is_ a
> point, of engaging with a work of poetry which is not simply,
> or simply not,
> meant to be engaging is extraordinarily difficult to locate,
> if it has to be
> located", (The Gig, 2 ; P58)
> On Maximus lll, there may well be the odd poem that
> Olson "would have"
> "chosen" to exclude. John Wieners told me sometime in late
> 1965, with just a
> hint of mischievous relish, that Charles was going around
> tearing out the
> page of his poem _Maximus of Gloucester_(p.101) "I've
> sacrificed everything,
> including sex and woman/ -or lost them-..." from every copy
> he could find of
> the college magazine it was published in. When we read now in
> the newly
> published correspondence with Frances Boldereff, how
> recently, in addition
> to the death of his wife, he'd also been 'rejected' by this
> longtime love,
> you can start to understand this reaction. My guess is that
> within a year or
> two, that kind of personal embarrassment had simply
> transmuted into the
> wonderful primal openness of_ Max lll, so that it's inclusion
> is 'right',
> whether or not Boer or Butterick ever_ knew! Incidently,
> right in there with
> the almost unbearably moving address to his father, and the
> late quartets'
> cosmic eeriness (no NOT Eliot, Billy!) is some of the most gloves-off
> political poetry I've ever read. David Bromige rightly speaks
> of a 'virtual
> revolution' in retrospect, but reading Olson here it feels
> more like a real
> second civil war.
> On Andrea Brady's "The White Wish", I would have thought that the
> 'old-fashioned'..'obsession with the (base) sentence (form)
> was an entirely
> appropriate means for registering the trauma of rape. The highly
> intelligent, & not at all mechanical, semantic instabilty
> conveyed within
> that syntactic 'wall of stones' throughout The White Wish, can ONLY be
> registered through something you hang on to, blindly. We all
> _know_ that
> only crazies talk in fully formed sentences. It's the same quality of
> Olson's injunction to 'use the process', Pound's 'shape cut into time'
> (don't have ABC with me here) that you find often in _good_ Modernist
> writing, say Roy Fisher's "Passing Newbridge-on-Wye": "All
> the space under
> the bridge/fills with the light/ of the bare ash-trees and
> the stone:// what
> glitter the softness has/comes from the February sun.." Exclamations
> dissolving into muted & qualified statement; process within
> constraint, like
> Brady's 'stomacher'.
> Too much to list here, but from the opening phrase 'For
> charity' poised
> between the here & now, medieval Provence & a timeless 'for
> Pity's sake', I
> find this poem impressive. If Billy is interested in 'subject verb and
> object becoming interchangeable', I'll take him through,
> after this message
> from our sponsors,
>
> All best,
> John.
>
>