Yeah, but sometimes it must be hard for those mainstreamers to occupy the political, the moral and the aesthetic low ground.

Best,

Jamie

--- On Sun, 15/1/12, Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

From: Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Chris Hamilton Emery on the elusive nature of a “poetry establishment”
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Sunday, 15 January, 2012, 22:11

It's fine to be a member of the mainstream. But a mark of that membership is often the denial that a non-mainstream exists, and that's not fine. In the US, and I think in Britain and Ireland as well, you may have noticed that those in the non-mainstream generally recognize the names of the more important mainstream poets, have even read them, but the reverse is often not the case--I've had the experience of mentioning Oppen or Spicer and being greeted with blank stares, this from people university-certified as poets. Mention Randolph Healy or Peter Manson in mainstream circles and see what you get.

Best,

Mark

-----Original Message-----
>From: Jamie McKendrick <[log in to unmask]" target=_blank rel=nofollow>[log in to unmask]>
>Sent: Jan 15, 2012 3:37 PM
>To: [log in to unmask]" target=_blank rel=nofollow>[log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Chris Hamilton Emery on the elusive nature of a “poetry establishment”
>
>I found Michael’s foray into the Swedish detective genre entertaining, and
>particularly liked his rheumy-eyed, old string-puller with a taste for
>Persian classics. But from then on his account becomes unrecognizable. I
>wouldn’t quarrel – who would? – with his first proposition (‘And yet,
>cultural establishments exist’) but with the way he goes on to describe
>them: ‘like social classes....like the morale of sick institutions’. Once
>these analogies are accepted – and, as Chris Hamilton Emery’s note suggests,
>we all tend to think the establishment isn’t us – then ‘the outsider’
>becomes the untainted figure whose perception is being suppressed and
>‘silenced, if it can’t be dimmed’. Here we have the "mainstream" as a
>tottering Arab dictatorship.
> The imagined ‘response to the outsider-( "but you don't understand, if
>only you could meet... you would soon see... etc etc")...manifests the
>effective though invisible self-defence of the establishment.’ Hardly that
>effective: such feeble pleading wouldn’t really be the manner of any
>establishment that, as Mark argues, ‘holds most of the power’. I think by
>this stage we’ve moved into Fantasyland - a fantasy which flatters the
>integrity of the writer by assuming the lack of it among others writers
>perceived to be more centrally placed.
> Having been described on this list, without any apparent malice, as an
>‘insider’ by someone whom I’d consider just as much an insider – or an
>outsider – as myself, I’m inclined to agree with Chris’s sense of the
>indeterminacy and relativity of the term. At what point does somebody cease
>to be an outsider? When they are published by a bigger press? When they
>receive reviews from newspapers? When they write for the newspapers? When
>they have an institutional teaching post? When they start writing reviews of
>their nephew’s translations from the Persian?
>Best,
>Jamie
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "[log in to unmask]" target=_blank rel=nofollow>[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]" target=_blank rel=nofollow>[log in to unmask]>
>To: <[log in to unmask]" target=_blank rel=nofollow>[log in to unmask]>
>Sent: Friday, January 13, 2012 11:58 AM
>Subject: Re: Chris Hamilton Emery on the elusive nature of a “poetry
>establishment”
>
>
>A familiar chapter in any Bildungsroman, when the hero begins to pierce the
>outer layers of the establishment only to to find its centre constantly
>shrinking and moving away, - to find that no-one including of course
>himself is ever part of what once (from outside) seemed so monolithic and
>solid. We chase it down, and after many Proustian penetrations eventually
>reduce it to (Stieg Larsson-style) a single mild, old and terminally-ill
>gentleman who views us through milky ice-blue eyes and murmurs that, these
>days, he restricts himself to a few lines of Sir David Minnay's exquisite
>translations from the Ancient Persian, but even so, this is really only
>because Davie is a grand-nephew...
>
>And yet, cultural establishments exist (it is better not to think only of
>poetry); they are much better exemplified by the Institution and by mass
>structures than by the supposed individuals concerned: e.g. in this case
>schools, colleges, newspapers, radio programmes, prizes, societies,
>diplomatic exchanges, tourism hotspots... They exist and their patterns
>persist, like social classes, in spite of all the individuals who decry
>social class or prefer never to mention it. They persist like the morale of
>sick institutions, exemplified by no single employee yet hugely resistant to
>transformation. The outsider's view, as so often, is the perception that
>must be silenced if it can't be dimmed. And the response to the
>outsider -( "but you don't understand, if only you could meet... you would
>soon see... etc etc")- itself manifests the effective though invisible
>self-defence of the establishment.