Tout homme digne de ce nom
A dans le coeur un Serpent jaune...
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-----Original Message-----
From: Jaime Robles <[log in to unmask]>
Sender: British & Irish poets <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2013 10:07:26
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: British & Irish poets <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Right Twist
Well, California's not exactly a Garden of Eden. Or perhaps it is, given the undeniable presence of snakes in that fabulous original sanctuary of creation … I find most of my snakes dwell within, somewhere between my frontal lobes and the mysterious region where my spine connects to my brain. Some are poisonous, others not.
Jaime
___________________________
Amor tussisque non celantur.
(Love, like a cough, is hard to hide.)
—Ovid
On 30 Jul 2013, at 04:03, Jamie Mckendrick wrote:
> David, sure there are canny operators who can make little or less talent cart them a fair way, and I'm as prone to splenetic annoyance at this as the next person. Age doesn't help. But having had the experience of following various Venice Biennali increasingly geared to business and big money, the Saatchi phenomenon in its heyday, they left me with a huge relief at returning to the obscure and relatively untainted world of poetry where you just need a pencil and a notebook (well, art you could do with that too but it helps to have good quality paper).
> On the other thread, Jaime's experience that on the west coast "we had more permission, or demanded more...which means allowing more licence to others" depicts a more spacious and tolerant world I wouldn't mind inhabiting, and would be happy to believe exists.
> (My point wasn't about Prynne's publishing choices but about the tremulous way in which commentators discuss them. A bit of Plumpedenken wouldn't go amiss. I've never presumed to criticise anyone's publishing choices, though an uninformed assumption I'd made here some years ago about Prynne's self-exclusion from an OUP anthology was helpfully corrected by Peter Riley. I have personal reasons for being grateful for what was clearly on his part a disinterested act of solidarity with a number of evicted poets. Quite at odds with Stanton's account, this suggests a poet who is thinking very precisely about an endangered space that still exists for poetry.)
> Best,
> Jamie
> Sent using BlackBerry® from Orange
> From: David Bircumshaw <[log in to unmask]>
> Sender: British & Irish poets <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2013 08:36:39 +0100
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> ReplyTo: British & Irish poets <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: Right Twist
>
> Jamie
>
> there're too many threads spinning off from what you say for me to even begin to gather them up. Just a few impressions of world instead: for myself, in the Nineties (which was when I was most actively writing) I had this kind of saving sense of poetry as being a sort of clearing in the woods, a happy space in a linguistic world being suffocated by the dead forests of managerial language. Notice those fumbling qualifications: kind of, sort of etc.
> Nowadays it feels like 'poetry' has become a language absorbed the dead mass of the Management, as if the living dead have taken over there too. Once the word 'poet' used mean a bright light in my head, now it makes me wary. I'm sure there are only a few poets making a direct living from their writing, but there are an awful lot of people making a living indirectly from a membership in the nebulous club. And if you can massage a slim volume or two into a modest middle-class income through being a 'community poet' or 'language worker' or 'poetry activist' (those are all real self-descriptions I've heard from some) etc etc that's a very good return on labour. In that sense I guess you can say 'poetry is corrupt' or if you prefer 'poetry is susceptible to corruption'.
> I'm not in this really thinking of Mr Prynne or Mr Heaney, not at all in fact, both are fine poets with real voices of their own. As for the seventeenth century jackets, the early modernists used to like to think of themselves as aristocratic cognoscenti too. It's not new.
>
> best
>
> David
>
>
> On 28 July 2013 17:56, Jamie Mckendrick <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> David, Sean's argument, and not only his, that there are economic realities that publishers have to confront strikes me as incontrovertible, but shouldn't imply any obeisance on the part of writers. I don't really see poetry as an especially lucre-corrupted zone. 3 or so poets in a generation might scrape a living from the art if they're on gcse or a level courses and are charismatic readers. Others would have to slog away teaching creative writing or find something else to earn by. (For all of which I find Sean's notion of 'apartheid' way off beam - inequalities, yes but...).
> A danger of dismissing the economics of the book trade surfaced for me in reading that Jacket article on Heaney and Prynne by Rob Stanton. The dice was loaded against Heaney but there was much that was considered and helpful. Only when he surveyed Prynne's publishing history "fugitive publication - small presses, limited runs. elegant editions" etc. did he fall into hushed and bathetic revery seeing these as a way of "circulating work to interested parties without necessarily imposing on everyone else." Perhaps he sees the dwindling recesses of poetry sections in major bookshops as noisily and greedily strong-arming passers-by into reluctant purchases. However fugitive, a book is for sale or it's not for sale. Stanton then searches literary history for elusive precedents that might do justice to the scrupulosity of Prynne's resistance to any commodification, and alights on the courtly "model of private circulation popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries". Given this obfuscating and aristocratic option I'm not so averse to the tawdry commerce of the book trade, and don't at all mind discussing the realities of it.
> (You're right, apart from the will. that we don't know much about Shakespeare's choices but a fair bit about his theatre - others here will know a lot more than I do.
> Best,
> Jamie
> Sent using BlackBerry® from Orange
> From: David Bircumshaw <[log in to unmask]>
> Sender: British & Irish poets <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Sun, 28 Jul 2013 12:12:17 +0100
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> ReplyTo: British & Irish poets <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: Right Twist
>
> Jamie
>
> I live among the onfall of slippage, it would be quite comforting to think I imagine it, but I reckon my lurid dreaming mind would come up with something much more garish, not so deadly dull banal. as for what appeared to this mind, in our mutual and pretend-space, well it did seem to me that a criticism of Salt publishing and its proprietors was answered with a defence of Business Realities and list proprieties which then jumped ('morphed') into assertions of Economic Reality In Publishing, and how all good poets should behove (the worship of) that little deity.
>
> That is what appeared to happen to me. I had this terrible sense of this list being rewritten by the no longer cuddly Vince Cable (or even that well-known novelist Iain Duncan Smith). Of course, the time in which I read messages cannot be identical to anyone else's, and the Interpreter's House of my higher neural functions, yes, even though a Brummie I lay claim to those, would, and by the way Windows has just flashed up that it's Peter Riley's birthday 'all day' tomorrow, happy birthday Peter, you old aesthete, and, where was I, heavens above as they're not below, I've lost my main verb, this is what it must feel like to be German. I rest my breath (metaphoric) if not my case)
>
> best
>
> David
>
>
> PS making statements about Shakespeare bears in the literary world the danger of being like those preachers who describe the will (no pun intended, maybe) or intentions of God. All we mere mortals can be sure of is what he didn't do, i.e see his major works into print, in the case of Shakespeare, or give anything like an explanation of His Divine Plan, in the case of God,.
>
>
> On 27 July 2013 23:54, Jamie Mckendrick <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> David, I didn't catch that morph into validation. Sincerely, that hadn't entered my head. Your imaginary first instance of "slippage" that someone may argue that capitalist models function in book production and "by inference" in the writing of poems may be the cause of this morphing.
> I feel a bit torn on the question. On one side, your disregard seems quite appropriate. I don't see any reason why poets should have to bother themselves about any Economic Realities, except as normal citizens might have to or want to.
> Unless they start talking about how publishers should operate.
> Even then, I can't see any advantage in being economically literate to the actual writing, which is what it is, with or without fancy covers.
> Two of the greatest poets of their age, Dickinson and Hopkins, would back up your view.
> On the other side, they are almost unique exceptions. And even your example of Shakespeare (I assume) isn't quite as clinching as it sounds. He concerned himself very minutely, it seems, with the practicalities and economic realities of staging his plays (surely a form of pubication) and seems to have done quite well out of it. Far better than even an unpirated issue of the Sonnets might have done.
> For myself, I'm quite interested in how publishers work. With the recession, or with a more draconian economic model that might have anyway been emerging, it seems as though the older proceedings are changing (of the better selling poets on a list effectively sponsoring the less popular ...here we're talking fractions) and a higher threshold of expected sales to justify any re-publication. It remains to be seen how this will effect poems in book form. Badly's my guess.
> Best, Jamie
>
> Sent using BlackBerry® from Orange
> From: David Bircumshaw <[log in to unmask]>
> Sender: British & Irish poets <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Sat, 27 Jul 2013 21:37:37 +0100
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> ReplyTo: British & Irish poets <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: Right Twist
>
> i don't know whether you or I have missed something crucial Jamie. My sense is that a conversation about a particular publishing house has morphed into an issue of validation, and that it has somehow drifted into Economic Realities. Ok, now for me, one of the the attractions of Poetry (note the capital) has always been its utter (mean that word) disregard of those aforehinted Realites (another capital!) in relation to its production, dissemination etc.
>
> i don't think poetry is unique in that, but I like, or I used to like, the idea that it was in good bad company. Ok, it was mainly middle-class boys, but it had something in common with the Mississippi Blues, or Jean Calment's 'horrible, smelly old man' that used to come in her family shop when she was a child (Van Gogh) etc etc. After all, the greatest poet in the English language never bothered to see his major works into print.
>
> PS sympathies about Blackberry phones - I still struggle
>
> best
>
>
> On 27 July 2013 21:21, Jamie Mckendrick <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I'm quite happy with keeping the process of writing (whatever weird imperatives one invents for oneself) separate from the process of publication. Having written something you can throw it in the bin, keep it in a drawer, show it to friends, or publish it. If someone publishes it for you on paper, they have to make decisions about how to keep financially afloat. Or have I missed something crucial?
> Sent using BlackBerry® from Orange
> From: David Bircumshaw <[log in to unmask]>
> Sender: British & Irish poets <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Sat, 27 Jul 2013 21:00:06 +0100
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> ReplyTo: British & Irish poets <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: Right Twist
>
> No no no: you write poems, if you really have to, if the world might disintegrate if you don't.
>
> And then you leave the rest to fate.
>
> :
>
>
> --
> David Joseph Bircumshaw
> Website and A Chide's Alphabet
> http://www.staplednapkin.org.uk
> The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
> Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/david.bircumshaw
> twitter: http://twitter.com/bucketshave
> blog: http://groggydays.blogspot.com/
> Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.com
>
>
>
> --
> David Joseph Bircumshaw
> Website and A Chide's Alphabet
> http://www.staplednapkin.org.uk
> The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
> Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/david.bircumshaw
> twitter: http://twitter.com/bucketshave
> blog: http://groggydays.blogspot.com/
> Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.com
>
>
>
> --
> David Joseph Bircumshaw
> Website and A Chide's Alphabet
> http://www.staplednapkin.org.uk
> The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
> Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/david.bircumshaw
> twitter: http://twitter.com/bucketshave
> blog: http://groggydays.blogspot.com/
> Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.com
