>Thanks, Dave--I'm curious about _Prospect_ too. Since it's on your side of
>the pond, though, maybe you could sniff around some--? A glance through its
>back issues suggests that this Lind fellow is a regular contributor,
>although not on poetry up to now ("and a good thing too," as the Fish would
>have it). Wonder where he got the idea that Eliot, Pound, and Ashbery
>were/are academics. (Did the first two earn PhDs anywhere, as he alleges?
>News to me, if so.) So give us the scoop on the rag, do! Thanks--Candice
>
I had a swift look at its back issues and some of the other articles -
it's clearly a right wing magazine, defending the tenets of globalisation
etc and mocking the critics of the New World Disorder, though it's had
some impressive contributors - Llosa and Steiner among others.
I read the guy from Prospect (like the Person from Porlock?) with raised
eyebrows: it's not an unfamiliar argument. It reminded me of the elderly
man who stood up at the end of a reading which I was recently part of,
and asked aggressively: "And what's wrong with rhyming verse?"
Easy to make fun of... but perhaps if these questions were more generally
regarded as symptoms, rather than diagnoses, of contemporary bewilderment
about "standards" and how to "judge", then their arguments might be more
fruitful. A little historical perspective and accuracy might help,
too... Coleridge, who certainly wrote in rhymed verse and knew his
trochees from his iambs aggressively defended his right to write for a
few and admitted frankly that he knew he would never be a "popular poet".
Best
A
