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Oh Nate, may you indeed never become old and sentimental and fall into indulgence. Something bad happened to me between my first & third years at university -- I remember rereading for Finals and discovering in dismay that I was not wholly immune even to the equally / differently preposterous 'Beautiful Lofty Things', for heaven's sake! or e.g. (only slightly less embarrassingly) 'The New Faces'. It gets worse -- he can be not just silly but mendacious and generally repellent, as in 'In memory of Eva Gore-Booth & Con Markiewicz' (not the most famous example either but one that haunts me) and it still get under the skin (of those with this disorder), by some condensation of desire out of sheer willed, awkward, even stupid, determination to *make a Poem ... Anyway, I'm having electrolysis for it, but they say it takes years. Since I'm here, Jeff Hilson & Sean Bonney read at Subvoicive in London tonight, both good long sets, to a numerous and appreciative audience. I can't talk about the work really, but both, students of Bob Cobbing's fortnightly Writers Forum writing and performing workshops, read flawlessly, in their different styles (both read Cobbing tribute poems too, as recently published by Adrian Clarke & Lawrence Upton in the Cobbing 80th birthday anthology). Jeff's poems strike sparks, constantly dodging predictability but placing sounds and suggestions together most felicitously always. Owing something doubtless to Jeff's study of Zukovsky, among others, e.g. surely Stein. Some are copious and some are spare, e.g. the latter in his new book, A Grasses Primer, published by Form Books today, but I look forward to publication forthcoming of the 12-part sequence he gave us, called something like 'Scratchers' (??) which was -- totally fab. His reading finds all the energy of the language, without exaggeration. Sean, is it fair to call him a Beat poet? his work is full of livid extremities, of diction and psychological intimations, and political anger, and in performance is emitted urgently from all of him, rocking from one foot to the other, and visibly listening to the rhythm section. His new book, advertised here yesterday, weaves matter about an obsessive and eventually self-destructive artist, Jay de Feo, with evocations of London, using quite a range of technical effects. And his longest piece, 'Domestic poem' (domestic as in violence, one surmises), another tour-de-force to be published shortly. Among the more vocabulary-based poems (if this shorthandmeans anything 2 u but it's late & I shd be doing something else, & asleep also) were some distillations of famous folk ballads, lots of lovely blood and flowers, and the vigorously charming Cobbing piece. And if anyone could read the last 2 and a half lines of 'High Talk' and convince, well, it would be Sean ... e -----Original Message----- From: Nate and Jane Dorward <[log in to unmask]> To: British-Poets List <[log in to unmask]> Date: 24 October 2000 23:21 Subject: A terrible poem >I came across the following in flipping through the collected poems of a >Famous Poet today. It's phenomenally bad--the editor says it "walk[s] >effortlessly on the tight-rope between the sublime and the bathetic", which >is a kind way of putting it. Listmembers are welcome to guess the author's >identity. > >HIGH TALK > >Processions that lack high stilts have nothing that catches the eye. >What if my great-granddad had a pair that were twenty foot high, >And mine were but fifteen foot, no modern stalks upon higher, >Some rogue of the world stole them to patch up a fence or a fire. > >Because piebald ponies, led bears, caged lions, make but poor shows, >Because children demand Daddy-long-legs upon his timber toes, >Because women in the upper stories demand a face at the pane >That patching old heels they may shriek, I take to chisel and plane. >Malachi Stilt-Jack am I, whatever I learned has run wild, >From collar to collar, from stilt to stilt, from father to child. > >All metaphor, Malachi, stilts and all. A barnacle goose >Far up in the stretches of night; night splits and the dawn breaks loose; >I, through the terrible novelty of light, stalk on, stalk on; >Those great sea-horses bare their teeth and laugh at the dawn. > > >all best --N > >Nate & Jane Dorward >[log in to unmask] >THE GIG magazine: http://www.geocities.com/ndorward/ >109 Hounslow Ave., Willowdale, ON, M2N 2B1, Canada >ph: (416) 221 6865 > > > > > %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%