Bill's playful allusions to boring poetry remind me of some of the stigmas
of our craft which we have to carry round with us - poetry's "boring" for
most of our mates at school, and carries on being "boring" for most of
our grown-up mates too. Nevertheless, we plough on, I guess because (a) we
don't agree, on the whole (see Marianne moore on Poetry, etc) and (b) at
some level or other, we'd even go so far as to say it's important.
Then it all gets tentative, and we tend to get a bit truculent and divided
about why we think it's important. That "unacknowledged legislator" crap
has a lot to answer for. "A place for the genuine" was Ms. Moore's answer,
which is OK, or "Poetry is for interested people" quoth Zukofsky, sternly.
And somewhere or other we all make our own working definitions of what's
"genuine" or who's "interested" and how. As Jordan says, "poetry's job is
the one you the poet convince poetry it needs you to do -- "
And with that it becomes apparent that, unless we're braindead, our
working definitions and practices will change for each of us, and over
time, with the common linking factor that for each of us, at the time we
did [insert name of work] it wasn't boring for us, it was something that
needed doing. So I look at work by, for instance Bill Griffiths or Peter
Riley, over a period of time, and though they're very different writers, I
can see in both of them a concern for the materials they're working with,
and a responsibility (we've already talked about the r-word, haven't we?)
in their level of engagement which locates them in the same region, if
not side-by-side.
I nearly added "at least" - but it isn't at least, it's great, big,
important, exciting, not trivial or boring. As long as people like Bill
and Peter (and others) ARE concerned for/with the languages and the facts
they work in, are not simply taking them pre-digested or undigested, then
there's a flip, a level of tacit or even overt criticism or
counter-statement for the mass of linguistic perversion which faces us
daily, and of which Keston's resume of Klintonspeak is but one, great,
seen-it-coming-a-mile-off example.
Or So It Seems To Me.
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