Hi Mairead! and thanks for your post on OTHER. It's a bit sad when all
that varied poetry gets reduced to a bodybag count, I think, but I'll have
to put hand up and say (as I've said before on this list) Yes, there
aren't enough Irish poets in OTHER. Sorry. Also, there aren't enough women
poets in it, ditto. Likewise, since we mention it it, not enough Scots. Or
Welsh poets. The black poets are also underrepresented (though the
response I've had from Fred D'Aguiar said nothing of this, but was wildly
enthusiastic about the *range covered in the anthology as a whole). There
aren't enough of the excellent younger poets of these islands. Select any
of the longstanding regional or poetic groupings of the place, and you'll
find serious omissions. I'm aware of huge shortfalls in the coverage of
the sound/visual/performance poetry scene.
And so on - proportional representation it ain't, fair cop, and it
certainly makes no claims to being canonical. But I hope that enough of
the work is new to you, and exciting enough, in its various ways, for you
not to feel you've wasted your hard-earned dosh on it!
You ask the important question: "Why should the "Other" be defined by
nationality anyway? What part does nationality play in Other poetry?" In a
way I agree with you - as we've said before on this list, one day we won't
have to make such artificial groupings. But in pragmatic terms, we were
faced with that "completely buried modernist/experimental tradition" which
Maurice Scully refers to, which operates in both UK and Ireland: we wanted
to do something to excavate it for new readers. Of course, we're not alone
in this, and there are glimmers which suggest that folk are becoming more
aware of what was buried. But in case you're in any doubt about the
"otherness" of these poets, take a look at the bunch of of big UK
anthologies which have just come out: Armitage and Crawford; O'Brien;
Forbes. "Dolly the Anthology" one list member referred to them as - each
covering exactly the same ground as each other, and with a ludicrously low
overlap factor with OTHER. It's like we lived somewhere else. Armitage n
Crawford feign shortsightedness - noting of the likes of Bunting, Jones
and MacDiarmid that they "seem something of an isolated, if exciting,
outcrop in the post-war geography" - to produce this effect they've had to
overlook the whole tradition which relates to them!
With OTHER we had an opportunity to introduce a bunch of writers with
honourable and significant outputs to an audience which, to be frank,
hadn't a hope of discovering many of them them for themselves. It would've
been great to've had more pages (about twice as many for starters) and a
budget to match - but we really didn't think we could squeeze those out of
our hard pushed publishers! Maybe next time...
RC
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