Only a couple of remarks, I suppose they are.
(1) The best insults are like the best ghosts : you don't realize what they
were until later. *, **
(2) "a poem provides no-one answer, but answers arise as one gets down to
it"--a quote from my own poetry. This, vis-a-vis Ric Caddel's comments on
Robert Sheppard this a.m. And (also from my work) "we pay for answers not
questions around here"--irony-caveat here--these words put in mouth of an
actant i wouldnt like if I met him coming out of the high st bank.
Well, then, (3) : I am mostly staying away from the PoMo debate in these
pages, just that it's been going on around me here for 35 years & there's
too much PoMo furniture in my head to allow me to speak with any freshness.
Well, and also that the term is so much like a broken umbrella that local
meanings differ vastly & to some extent a different matrix lends definition
and that matrix in britpo terms is largely occluded for me, my delinquency.
Even Modernism fluctuates---Eliot and Pound meet antitheses in Auden and
Spender, don't they?, yet despite the last-named's essay wherein he would
distinguish himself from Modernism, he often ends up in that bin. Is Thom
Gunn a Modernist or a PoMo? To my mind, Raworth's poetry, or Allen
Fisher's, fit many definitions of the PoMo, and are radically different
from Gunn's. Despite Keston's caveat against a knee-jerk cry for
"specifics," I think the terms of PoMo are now so stretched that they might
only regain meaning in relation to the particular practice of a particular
poet. ***
David
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* for the ghosts part of this bon mot, I am indebted to Henry James.
** Cris, the lad's remark re Hague is wonderfully crisp. It could be
applied with equal ease to Blair, non?
*** It was Clive Bush who said to me, in an improvisational flash (and a
canard, btw, but who cared at that moment) "Oh, Eric wouldn't like _that_ .
He's PoMophobic."
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