On Tuesday, the Times revealed that a team of scientists had vindicated a nearly seventy-year-old theory of his about the development of the Polyommatus blue butterflies:

[I]n a speculative moment in 1945, [Nabokov] came up with a sweeping hypothesis for the evolution of the butterflies he studied, a group known as the Polyommatus blues. He envisioned them coming to the New World from Asia over millions of years in a series of waves. Few professional lepidopterists took these ideas seriously during Nabokov’s lifetime. But in the years since his death in 1977, his scientific reputation has grown. And over the past 10 years, a team of scientists has been applying gene-sequencing technology to his hypothesis about how Polyommatus blues evolved. On Tuesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, they reported that Nabokov was absolutely right.

Dr. Naomi Pierce, a co-author of the report, organized four separate trips to the Andes to collect the blues, and then she and her colleagues at Harvard sequenced the genes of the butterflies, as well as comparing the number of mutations each species had acquired. Their research resulted in the revelation that five waves of butterflies came from Asia to America, as Nabokov had originally hypothized.

From: [log in to unmask] href="mailto:[log in to unmask]">GOODBY JOHN

To: [log in to unmask] href="mailto:[log in to unmask]">[log in to unmask]

Sent: Saturday, October 08, 2011 11:56 AM

Subject: Re: Forward for RFL

I agree with Jamie, it is an eccentric judgement - as if desperate to prove that no poem that contains apple blossom and an 'English lane' could possibly be any good. I know my Molesworth, but the the Song of the Chiffchaff has nothing to do with the RFL poem. As for Andrew Motion, I recall poems of his about walking around New York City from the early 1980s - he's not as hung up on Georgian ruralism as Michael seems to believe, whatever you think about how good those poems are. It seems rather naive to damn a poem by theme - at odds with the formal issues the people on this list generally think are important. 

Can't there be poems which appeal to 'mainstream' and 'alternative' poetry readerships? Isn't this one of them? Shouldn't we welcome that as a special kind of achievement?

I don't get the rather sniffy citation of Nabokov's lepidopterist skills as proof that you can know about moths and be mainstream, either. Last time I looked Nabokov was a fairly 'avant garde' novelist, a precursor of postmodernism. A better precursor might be Guido Gozzano, the Italian crepusculario poet, who had a deep interest in lepidoptera and used the technical terms in the sequence 'Le farfalle'. He uses regular metre and rhyme and plain language, but then it's in the context of d'Annunzio-drenched Italian poetry, so it was a pretty radical thing to do too. Which is to say, a lot of this is about context.

Best,

John

On 7 October 2011 15:01, Jamie McKendrick <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Either way, the idea of this poem outmainstreaming the mainstream seems to me a very eccentric reading. I'd never heard of the 50s era satire you mention and given the context the chiffchaff seems much more likely to be as literal as the two moths Scotopteryx  and Camptogramma, as  the moss Grimmia and the Helina and Phaonia flies. It also gives him giffgaff for free - apparently (according to Wiki) Scots Gaelic for "mutual giving" and some recent telephone company. Beats me what any notion of the mainstream has to do with all this.
Best,
Jamie
----- Original Message ----- From: "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]AC.UK>
Sent: Friday, October 07, 2011 2:24 PM
Subject: Re: Forward for RFL


Always fun to bash the mainstream, but that wasn't what I intended on this occasion.