Dave,
As I was involved in the New Gen – the word ‘Promotion’ might be a give-away but maybe not to the extent you’re claiming – I could shed some light or dark on the matter. Forbes as editor didn’t enter into the judging process and may indeed not have cared much for some of the choices (as can perhaps be divined in some of the Poetry Review issue’s editorial summaries ‘promoting’ them). The judges were Margaret Busby, a publisher and author, the poets Vicki Feaver and Michael Longley, John Osborne, Professor of American Studies at Hull University and editor of the poetry magazine Bête Noire, and The Guardian's chief literary critic, James Wood. Whatever the worth of their choices none of the judges were answerable in making them to the Arts Council or any other shadowy managerial bodies, and I can see no reason to make that connection.
I may be betraying a bias here, but I think quite a few of the choices have weathered very well. Others excluded, it’s true, might have weathered at least as well, or better.
Best wishes,
Jamie
From: David Bircumshaw
Sent: Sunday, December 08, 2013 4:03 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: baBoom
Tim
With regard to the New Gen, and wuth risk to sausages here too, Poetry Review, under Peter Forbes, had a very important role in its propagation. My impression was that this in turn was linked to the Poetry Society's relationship to funding bodies and the need to promote a poetry that fulfilled managerial expectation. Since the Nineties, with the rise of suitably supervised pub poetry and the switch to Creative Writing in universities, the managerial web has multiplied, it certainly isn't just the Arts Council now. Whether its mainstream or performance or even in some cases avant-garde, poetry that is 'endorsed' is increasingly a product of a society of managerial determination. That's partly why so much it sounds the same, like the Augustans, it's a consequence of patronage. Got to go, the smoke alarm is in a tizzy
Best
Dave
Sent from my BlackBerry smartphone from Virgin Media
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From: Tim Allen <[log in to unmask]>
Sender: British & Irish poets <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 8 Dec 2013 14:51:19 +0000
To: <[log in to unmask]>
ReplyTo: British & Irish poets <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: baBoom
Thanks Jamie, interesting. I still don't see how anything you say below changes the central notion - can you really mount up what can be construed as exceptions that prove the rule to the point where they disprove the rule?
For me to come in at this point and argue why I don't think someone such as Muldoon is an exception would result in a long and protracted exchange that I haven't the stomach for, quite honestly. (Muldoon has been discussed here at length before as well.) I've never read Paulin's books because I've never liked what I've read of his in mags and anthologies so haven't thought about him much. And listening to his views on the Late Review show or whatever it was called I came to the conclusion that the man was a tit anyway. I was quite a fan of Reading's work, but again, if I could be bothered, i could make a case for the reasons his work was accepted by the mainstream - sometimes Yes, particularly in individual cases, these things are to do with more mundane things like where you went to university or who you know etc.
I always liked Berryman and I went through a stage of really liking Lowell as well but as I said, the Americans are part of our problem with relation to modernism in a unique way.
With regard to my question about do you want the notion to be not true, it is interesting if I turn it back upon myself. Now, here, at this moment, I want it to be true because it is psychologically convenient, I admit that. The older me found reasons for things that the young me couldn't understand - a combination of what I learnt from others and what I worked out for myself. Take away that rather broad notion of the the Brit mainstream being a reaction against modernism (and a reaction that was never one single thing, such as the Movement, but a wider phenomenon) and it just leaves a big gaping hole. It isn't the picture but it is certainly the frame, and without it the picture crumples and creases and leaves me standing here as ignorant as I ever was. Please please explain to me the reasons for the history of the relationship between mainstream and 'other' without it.
I also need to pick up your point about domestic realism. Domestic Realism was an important facet of the 90's mainstream, but it itself was part of a wider thing called vaguely the Northern School, which was in turn part of the wider thing called vaguely the New Poetic which played the dominant part (yes I know there were a handful of exceptions, including some very important ones) in the 1993 Bloodaxe anthology The New Poetry. This led to the New Gen. thing etc, about which so much has been said. Armitage and Paterson (two very different poets I admit) came out of that. The poetry which made Armitage his reputation was the epitome of the Northern School aesthetic and project, and I would say he's stayed pretty close to it since, despite the expansion of his subject matter and range. Paterson is something else. Paterson later showed more poetic ambition, maybe because his early stuff couldn't compete with the clear immediacy of Armitage and Duffy. Some people say he's complicated. I just think he's terribly confused.... but that's another story.
Damn - another hour wasted here. Do you know I burnt the sausages yesterday because of Britpo.
Cheers
Tim A.
On 7 Dec 2013, at 23:16, Jamie McKendrick wrote:
Hi Tim,
I’m glad you framed the final question as you did. Even not wanting it to be true would rather suggest, at least on my own part, an unwillingness to reject Modernism and a sense of its continuing relevance.
In anticipation, I’d already conceded the point you make that reading tastes may be one thing, practice another. I also conceded that there’s certainly elements of ‘mainstream’ practice that could be validly characterized in this way. Peter’s point, though, seems to me acute about even Larkin’s rejection of Modernism, as being very historically placed, and involving a self-rejection, especially of his earlier besottedness with Yeatsian rhetoric.
So for my answer. Yes, I genuinely believe that this way of mapping a whole range of practice is not just slightly wrong but seriously inadequate. I have a reluctance to name names because every time I’ve done so here it’s as if I’m setting up Aunt Sallies for members of the list to shy things at. But just to pick two, how on earth anyone could think Tom Paulin’s Fivemiletown or Walking a Line or Paul Muldoon’s Annals of Chile had even the remotest Movement or anti-Modernist context leaves me dumbfounded. Or Michael Hofmann’s Corona Corona. I really could go on for a while, but won’t, except
just to add to Peter’s amusing list of press names, I can’t resist hailing another Scouser with this from Peter Reading’s Ukelele Music:
[Squirrelprick Press is producing my
latest, Blood Drops in Distich,
hand-deckled limp-covered rag,
Special edition of ten].
Reading’s another poet who seems utterly unsuited to any notion of ‘domestic realism’. Armitage who’s been mentioned in this context is often far from anything like that. As is Paterson. This really isn’t a question of whether you like any of their poems, but rather of whether the description’s worth holding on to.
As I’ve said before I’ve no objection to a domestic setting for poems, precious few address the fact we (or at least I) may spend most of our time at home, but the idea of ‘realism’ again just doesn’t cut it for me.
To be honest I don’t even like your phrase “milder American modernisms”. Berryman’s linguistic and syntactic innovations still look to me as quirky and fresh as they did when I first read them. I know Elizabeth Bishop has been sanctified by many conservative poets here as in the States, and I can see how that would provoke a reaction, but she remains for me one of the best poets of the age. I enjoy a fair bit of Marjorie Perloff’s criticism but her recent attacks on Bishop seem bizarre, e.g.: “The composer-founder of Tropicalismo, Caetano Veloso, who has worked closely with the Concrete poets Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, told me that he could not fathom the Bishop cult.” That’s a bit like paying deference to Bob Dylan’s negative appraisal of Carlos Drummond de Andrade (should he have an opinion on the matter). But I’m wandering off the topic.
Best wishes,
Jamie
