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Jeff, I'm not sure why what I've written should seem " mostly technical points" or exactly what it would mean if they were. Surely technique, in which sound-effects play a large part, should be relevant in describing why it's a poem rather than "perhaps, good prose fiction" as you call it. I've also mentioned a complex of imagery that is tightly worked, and to spell out a bit more what I called the vaporous elements in the poem, the 'st' sounds which begin with "missed" (homophone 'mist'), which leads to 'steam' in the next line, then is heard again in just, dust, lipstick, lost, upstairs, understanding, lipstick, stowed...just to take one thread of sound through the poem (and there are others) - suggest to me that Armitage has, even at this very early stage of his writing an acoustic sense that can be a central part of the way we hear a whole poem - rather than a mere technical point, or even as "the measure of poetic accomplishment" which you bring out of nowhere. What I'd argue is that these are effects, including the rhythmic ones which (I agree with Robin) are a marked and positive aspect of Armitage's work, that make a flat paraphrase an utterly insufficient means of describing (and intentionally negating) the poem. This poem or any other. It seems to me that your obsessive concentration on 'empirical markers' means you ignore a whole range of other features integral to a poem. (Your Jacket article makes it clear, as I'd guessed all along, that your zealotry on behalf of this term "empirical" is deeply indebted to Easthope, in particular to his dim and philistine reading of Edward Thomas's 'Aldlestrop'. But perhaps we oughtn't to get into that again.) Jamie ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jeffrey Side" <[log in to unmask]> To: <[log in to unmask]> Sent: Wednesday, February 17, 2010 12:23 PM Subject: Re: Response to my criticisms of Armitage's poetry Jamie, these seem mostly technical points you like about the poem. But the poem is still like a thousand other poems expressing similar sentiments. It is, perhaps, good prose fiction writing; the sort that is esteemed in some creative writing classes, but is this to be considered the measure of poetic accomplishment? On Tue, 16 Feb 2010 23:55:09 -0000, Jamie McKendrick <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >It's a poem written when Armitage, I'm guessing, was 25, or younger. There's less fizz and word play in it than in many of the poems of his first book: it's quieter and maybe not that ambitious. That said, I like the vaporous sweep of the poem from its first image of what's "missed...by moments" , the steam of the "just-boiled kettle" to the final images of "the air, still hung with spores of your hairspray;/ body-heat stowed in the crumpled duvet." > The lines: > "and in this space we have worked and paid for > we have found ourselves and lost each other" >stand out for me, and I think will have "cost" something to write. > Its handling of the pentametre looks to me more than "adequately" skillful, as does the subtle "st" and "sp" sound-patterning that runs through it > > It's easy to make a crushing equivalence between the domestic and the bourgeois, but most of us live our lives in domestic settings and interiors, and I see no dishonour in their inclusion in a poem. As both a love poem and a poem about a relationship in crisis, I think it has a kind of tenderness and integrity. > (I doubt, though, that this account will tear Robin away from his admiration for David's post and the "specific points" he has somewhere found in his and Mark's dismissals.) >Jamie > >----- Original Message ----- > From: Mark Weiss > To: [log in to unmask] > Sent: Tuesday, February 16, 2010 11:11 PM > Subject: Re: Response to my criticisms of Armitage's poetry > > > And aren't paid for. > > At 06:02 PM 2/16/2010, you wrote: > > "How's that?" > I'd say it did quite well on the nastiness scale. > Though it doesn't distinguish itself from 20,000 other bits of "criticism" posted every day that cost nothing to write. > Jamie > > > From: Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]> > To: [log in to unmask] > Sent: Tuesday, 16 February, 2010 22:51:43 > Subject: Re: Response to my criticisms of Armitage's poetry > > Shall I try? Probably 20,000 poems a day are posted or published. Most are skillful and nothing more. Most take no risks whatsoever. Most want to be liked. Most are crashingly boring. This is one of those. > > The problem is, this sort of waste makes it harder to fight through to find the good stuff, the stuff that's cost the poet something to write and that will cost the reader something to read. > > How's that? > > At 05:46 PM 2/16/2010, you wrote: > > >It's adequate. Could I be nastier? > I dunno, Mark. Could you be? > Jamie > > Announcing The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry (University of California Press). > http://go.ucpress.edu/WholeIsland > > "Not since the 1982 publication of Paul Auster's Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry has a bilingual anthology so effectively broadened the sense of poetic terrain outside the United States and also created a superb collection of foreign poems in English. There is nothing else like it." John Palattella in The Nation > Announcing The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry (University of California Press). > http://go.ucpress.edu/WholeIsland > > "Not since the 1982 publication of Paul Auster's Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry has a bilingual anthology so effectively broadened the sense of poetic terrain outside the United States and also created a superb collection of foreign poems in English. There is nothing else like it." John Palattella in The Nation > >