Jeremy, I'm not the right person to fill in on
Davie - though I have read him on Pound ("his American turn") and Bunting
more recently, it's ages since I've looked at Purity of Diction.. It was more a
scepticism about the extent of his importance. Since I haven't an argument of my
own, that scepticism doesn't carry much weight. You may well be right about
Hopkins standing in for Thomas, clearly a bugbear for the Movement -
which does have something of a written manifesto in Robert
Conquest's introduction to the 1956 anthology New Lines, where he
enthusiastically cites Alduous Huxley's ugly rebuke to those whose
"bowels loosen for the caterwaulings of Tziganes. And
who love to listen to Negroes". (What would
Larkin have made of that!)
We're agreed that Movement orthodoxies don't "map neatly
onto any putative present mainstream."
Your sense that "something surely does change in the 50s, both
in Britain and America" is in key with Mark's observation - though he puts it a
decade earlier:
"I think it's undeniable that a wide rebellion against
modernism happened in English language literature (not just poetry) beginning in
the 40s, with Eliot in the vanguard. This never happen in Spanish, Italian, or
French, and I don't think it happened in German
either."
I don't see Eliot in the vanguard of this rebellion
- wouldn't 4 Quartets still be considered a Modernist poem? And as a
publisher he took on David Jones's In Parenthesis in 1937, his The Anthemata in
1952, W.S.Graham in 1949 just to mention a couple of poets who must surely
be part of a Modernist aesthetic - but you both make a strong point about the distinctive
reaction that occurred in Britain and America, and I can't really deny
it.
You could say that in Britain resistence to formal
experimentation went back further still. Just comparing the 1st WW poets Owen
and Sassoon to, say, Ungaretti, it feels as though they belong to different
centuries. Since Ungaretti was friends with Apollinaire he was far
more exposed to the sources of Modernism, but it's notable the way the
experience of the war encouraged the fragmentation of his lines and
conversely with Owen and Sassoon it seemed to cement them to traditional
forms.
I have some ideas about the particular tensions in Italian
poetry, but would like to hear more about the Spanish. Much of the contemporary
Spanish poetry I've been reading seems quite conventional, sometimes even
archaic.
Best,
Jamie
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, January 20, 2012 6:22
PM
Subject: Re: Chris Hamilton Emery on the
elusive nature of a "poetry establishment"
Sorry to jump in so very late on this – but I think the turn to
historical specifics here is interesting, and perhaps might help one to
complicate the usual narrative. I'd be interested to hear more, Jamie,
about Davie's role. Without wishing to put words in Peter Riley's mouth,
I think perhaps the notion is that a work like Purity of Diction in English
Verse uses an attack on Hopkins as a way of cutting links with the poetry of
the 1940s, or, better, the Apocalyptics and Dylan Thomas especially.
Davie thus plays a part in writing the unwritten manifesto of the
Movement (to put it crudely).
The Movement takes shape as Amis, Conquest, Wain, Davie and, yes, Larkin
begin to publish in prominent venues. I dare say many would agree that
Larkin is probably the only figure here that anyone would want to retain.
The Movement, however, does establish the orthodoxies that for a time
(how long?) are hegemonic. Writers who start out in the 50s in the UK
and find themselves dissatisfied with the prevailing climate, turn to America
(Tomlinson, for example) or Europe (Middleton) for something conspicuously
absent from the "official" verse culture. The survivors of modernism
have to be rediscovered (e.g. Bunting's resurgence).
Now, all this might be examined in finer grain. Davie, for
instance, is a much more complicated figure than the Movement association
suggests (he has his own American turn). And even Larkin has his early
passion for Thomas and Yeats.
I agree that the line from the Movement to the current scene is far from
direct or unbroken. I don't think Movement orthodoxies map neatly onto
any putative present mainstream – for one thing, the relationship between
culture and consensus has mutated a good deal. But something surely does
change in the 50s, both in Britain and America.
Best,
Jeremy
Tim, I need to think more about some of these
points, but like you am now a bit pressed for time.
But briefly:
1. and 2. Yes, I was being deliberately
silly in questioning Lawrence's mainstream credentials. But not entirely silly
- it was to question just how far back the fracture you mention
goes, and also its ultimate validity.
I can't find the reference but think that a
couple of years ago on this list Peter Riley asked in some exasperation when
exactly this unbridgeable gap appeared in the world of British poetry. I
didn't think his suggestion, if I remember it right, that Donald
Davie had much to do with it was convincing, but I still consider
the question an interesting one.
Your date of 1950 seems synchronous
with the Movement. It's often assumed by Crozier, Sheppard etc. that the
Movement's deliberately dry and insular aesthetic has been the
decisive shaping factor for the subsequent mainstream and this seems to me
simply untrue. I'm not alone among writers of my generation who might be
tagged mainstream in having had very little sympathy or interest in that group
(with the possible exception of Larkin), and in having from the outset looked
abroad, to the States, Europe, South America even for
sustenance.
It's a complex point about where continuum
exists and where it doesn't, and - not your fault - I'm not sure I've fully
understood it. Likewise 3.
4. 5. There's a lot at stake - poets don't have
to be nice, though for polemics to have any force there should some
recognizable reality. Caricature's bound to happen but the dreariness and
repetition of most of it!
I've been adding my own boring
repetitions here so I'd best get on with some work.
Best,
Jamie
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2012 12:23
PM
Subject: Re: Chris Hamilton Emery on
the elusive nature of a “poetry establishment”
Jamie, and Mark
I have been very interested in your exchange but haven't had the time
to contribute, and still don't. The thing you are both talking about has
occupied my mind and partly determined my actions for many years. I'd just
like to say...
1. When I talk about a British mainstream I am referring exclusively to
poetry here since the late 50's - for various reasons it is silly to talk
about a mainstream in the same sense before that.
2. The differences between mainstream and some non-mainstream are part
of a continuum, with a Duffy poem on one end for example and a Peter Riley
on the other, but another set of differences are due to complete fractures
in any supposed continuum. Chris Emery's piece can only be read in light of
the continuum but becomes meaningless in light of the fractures.
3. Any discussion of this subject gets mashed because of the cross over
of public polemics and private opinions and because of the struggle to
separate experiences of personal pleasure of reading from consequent
judgments of quality - both negativity and positivity tend to reenforce
themselves.
4. There is definitely a tendency on both sides to caricature the
poetry of the other - e.g. mainstream poetry is just anecdotes, the other
lot are just playing with words etc. This is superficial and stupid and
usually gets said because the person is trying to make cheap points too
quickly.
5. Let's not forget that not everybody out there is nice - powerplays
are real.
Cheers
Tim A.
On 18 Jan 2012, at 20:50, Jamie McKendrick wrote:
Mark, I think this has reached an impasse. Like you, I
have tried and re-tried with quite a number of poets whose work I find
arid, but there is a point at which I give up. I don't,
however, consider that any poet's obliged to persist in this way -
reading for pleasure seems to me as good a guide as any, unless of course
you're teaching or writing a critical essay on the topic, in which
case there surely is some obligation to go beyond the pleasure
principle. I've honestly no idea, and not that much interest in, what such
and such a poet is reading.
We can fairly assume that Prynne, for
example, has been widely read, way beyond non-mainstream
circles, at least since his work became more available in the
Bloodaxe Collecteds. But I appreciate that he may well be the exception to
the rule.
What I object to is something different -
blanket dismissals based on tribalism, publically aired and without
the evidence of thought or reading. I've no problem if, say, Marjorie
Perloff decides that Bishop's 'In the Waiting Room' is very small and
unimpressive as a poem. I disagree entirely but have confidence she would
know the poem and be capable of explaining her judgement. It wouldn't
be merely a prejudicial reflex. When the Cambridge academic Drew
Milne, in an otherwise highly articulate interview with Charles Bernstein
at Penn Sound - some 'visibility' there - is asked about the
mainstream, his first amusing response is 'I'm interested in Shakespeare
as a contemporary writer'.
When Bernstein insists on the irksome topic, his
reply is more or less:
"...I
think of it as verse, not really poetry at all: the work of people who
have a peculiarly truncated, modest conception of what they're
doing...largely anecdotal and oddly out of time...But then perhaps I don't
read it...it doesn't look like poetry to me." You might
expect something more than that from a teacher of modern poetry
at one of Britain's most prestigious universities, but his
righteous scorn for the mainstream gets the better of him. People talk all
kind of gibberish in interviews, myself very much included, but since
Heaney's relatively mild remarks about the avant-garde have been
anatomised here and elsewhere, I just offer this as a
counter-example.
I sort of see your idea about Asphodel discovering 'what will
be written and the form it will take' in the act of writing, though
the form of stepped triplets - loosely speaking - is already one that WCW
has been trying out in other poems before this one. It's his own form, but
I think his use of it demonstrates that even a relatively free
form can often involve certain footholds or ropes. I'm
possibly missing something in your argument, but that 'heuristic element'
seems to me just as evident and to the fore in another, earlier
flower poem like Bavarian Gentians by Lawrence. Heavens knows whether he's
considered mainstream.
Best,
Jamie