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On 28/11/04 8:01 PM, "Rebecca Seiferle" <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > Well, Alison, I think for me, and I'm speaking from outside this particular > loop, it > might be more informative or helpful if you were to say what you feel is the > "tradition" of British alternative poetry that you see, or the several that > you see. Hi Rebecca If I do, I too will be speaking as an outsider. And my observations will inevitably be vague and inexpert and highly arguable. But for the sake of it: the alternative traditions spoken about here are generally agreed - I think this is fairly unarguable, if schematic - to be the inheritors of the Modernists, Eliot David Jones, and most especially Pound, which was inflected back through US poetry like the Black Mountain poets, the New York School and so on in the 60s and 70s. Prynne's association with Dorn, say, Doug Oliver's association with Alice Notley and Ted Berrigan. And with it went a renewal of what was already there - say, Creeley's enthusiastic championing of native talents like Basil Bunting. This heralded the famous split between the Larkinesque and the Others. And it seems to me true that these alternative poetries have been and still are marginalised in the UK, in favour of something which is considered to be either in the Larkin tradition (although as I've said on this list, I like Larkin's poems) or "accessible". I had no idea this stuff existed until I lucked across this list in the late 90s. And within this alternative poetry there seem to be a number of vaguely identifiable streams. So there's a lot of work which has deeply allied itself with visual/performance art - Bob Cobbing, Lawrence Upton, Alaric Sumner, Maggie O'Sullivan, cris cheek, John Hall. And some of these vitalising energies in US poetry married what has often struck me as a Romanticism - politically aware, conscious poetry - inflected through a variety of modernist influences which still existed in the UK. Jeremy Prynne, Tom Raworth, Alan Halsey, Geraldine Monk, Peter Riley, Michael Haslam, Peter Redgrove strike me as examples of the variousness of that particular stream. There are alternative poetries which spring very strongly from regionalities of speech, poetries which interrogate the structures of language (JH Prynne, Caroline Bergvall). There's the alternative poetries in Ireland - Randolph Healey, Maurice Scully, Trevor Joyce, which are themselves very different from each other. And so on and so on. I've probably said enough now to hang myself. All corrections by the better informed are, of course, gratefully received. Best A Alison Croggon Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com