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I don't really want to get into a critique of Heaney, tho I'll admit that he generally puts me to sleep. What I want to take issue with is the measure of his worth by ticket prices. I assume you know better. Most people who lay out the bucks to get in are there for the reputation, not because the poetry has changed their lives. Would you apply the same criteria to pop music, I wonder, that the best are the priciest? Mark At 06:39 PM 4/6/2009, you wrote: >Intellectual criticism? > >You open your piece by supposition and invention, asking what Heaney saying >the avant garde is an old fashoned term, *really* says about his own poetic, >which has been likened to a Georgian one. From this you waffle into a very >boring read, making up stuff that offers the reader no exciting as a piece >of text. > >A picture of what's inside an academics head. But reading Heaney's work and >yours, it is clear that at your age, his wordplay is the most avant garde, >if we take avant garde to be inventive, memorable, different than what >everyone else is doing and arresting for the readers eye. That is part of >the reason he can sell his books to people other than his pals, and why you >do not. > >That is why he can charge 20 a quid a pop to hear him live, and you can't >get thirty punters free of charge. > >That is why his audience is the English speaking world, and yours is a bunch >of kids bored as you blather in class. > >You pretend this is irrelevant and act like a nob to poets whose tradition >you know zilch of, and a curriculum instinct and love leads them to study >and believe in, and you have nothing but a few twentieth century bores with >nothing but hot air to find faith in. > >Heaney's criticism, of all the gear I read, and I read from Pound to >Bernstein, was the most *poetic*, the overt display of which, you seem to >think has no place in contemporary poetry. > >Call me to the wind >and I will herd the shepherds in. >And floating leaves that crisp beneath my feet >will not wake me from my vividness. > > >This is your gear. Apart from the opening line which returns three on >agoogle in parenthesis check, the rest displays that Georgian poetic your so >against. Cliche makes up the rest: floating leaves, crisp beneath the feet. > >But you have a great capacity for prentension > >You made Pandora visit me >from her disruptions across >the sea her mane was >stretched like Cyprus flow and >her mind was as smooth as >causation at a time I had >reached my most content you > >etc etc. A narrator who garbles on with lots of Greek references which do >not give the reader any idea what's going on, just a boring *I* attempting >TO position himself on Parnassus and failing, because he thinks he's great >and everyone else is a lunatic or *appalling* at poetry, as your occassional >rant-blog states, the appalling state of mainstream poetry. > >Because I don't agree with you, I haven't read you properly. Well, me and >the rest of the planet.