Dear Jamie,
Many thanks for this.
I agree about Compendium as a valuable resource for modern poetry.
Re the US: after very early dips into Berryman, Lowell and Stevens – the first of these through mid-60s issues of the Critical Quarterly - WCW took me into
Pound (or vice versa) and then onto Olson and Oppen – and O’Hara rather than Ashbery.
My European poets tended to be earlier: Baudelaire and Rilke.
Best
Robert
From: British & Irish poets [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Jamie McKendrick
Sent: 23 January 2012 13:25
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Chris Hamilton Emery on the elusive nature of a "poetry establishment"
It feels vain to dwell on one's own 'formation' in a discussion group, but since it might be fairly representative of quite a number of writers of my generation who were not
in the least thrilled by the Movement, I'll give a personal list:
The US poets I did some academic work on were John Berryman and then Hart Crane, which meant also Stevens, WCW, Moore. I read Lowell and Bishop extensively. In those days
Compendium bookshop was a storehouse of US poetry so I could read a further in the contemporary including Ashbery (Schuyler I only came to later).
Europe, mainland as you say - the Russians Akmatova, Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam (in the latter case everything there was in English)
I read nearly everything from the excellent Penguin series of Modern European Poets, but the poets I was most drawn to were Ritsos, Cavafy and the East German Bobrowski.
With the Italian poets, despite trying again and again I couldn't fathom Montale until I learnt the language as the translations were poor. With Ungaretti I sneaked into
classes given by Patrick Boyde - I wasn't a student at Cambridge - and so was given an excellent grounding.
South American - obviously Neruda, but that enthusiasm palled and was decisively replaced by Vallejo. From Mexico I read Paz with interest but not much excitement, but had
his anthology (which contains the odd Sam Beckett translation).
I know this proves nothing except a particular taste but there's always the hope that what you respond to most vividly will leave some trace in what you write.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, January 23, 2012 10:54 AM
Subject: Re: Chris Hamilton Emery on the elusive nature of a "poetry establishment"
Which writers in the US, mainland Europe and South America were you looking to?
Robert
From: British & Irish poets [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Jamie McKendrick
Sent: 20 January 2012 16:04
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Chris Hamilton Emery on the elusive nature of a "poetry establishment"
Tim, I need to think more about some of these points, but like you am now a bit pressed for time.
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.
----- 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.
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.