Sean,
Almost the only part of your post that relates to poetry – “To
read Paul Muldoon or Seamus Heaney is a classic gloss on violence in Ireland” –
I’m afraid I find neither “well put” nor, more to the point, in the least
bit true or informative.
I can hear the list’s collective sigh: ‘O no, here we go again...’
But since I’ve kept silent for some ten months (after a knowingly false
accusation directed at me by David) and since no-one else apparently finds this
representation a caricature, I might as well speak.
Though your phrasing makes little sense, I’m guessing by your statement “To
read (M and H) is a classic gloss...” you mean that both these two very
different poets condone or in some way support violence in Ireland, and are in
that sense the moral equivalents of the tv sitcom you mention. Could you
elucidate this point? In what way “classic”? In what sense a “gloss”?
Apart from the ambiguous, pre-Troubles “snug as a gun”, in
Heaney’s poems every mention of guns, and they are frequent enough (“In poetry”
you say “the violence is rarely addressed”) seems to me to come with an explicit
moral recoil, and sometimes a vivid sense of disgust. Muldoon is rarely explicit
about anything but I don’t see how that makes his poems a “gloss on
violence”.
Both these poets do, in their contrasting ways “address” violence.
In mainland Britain, let alone the US, nearly all of us live in or near cities
with significant gun crime. Are poets who happen not to address this topic
necessarily culpable or collusive?
Jamie
Sent: Saturday, October 04, 2014 10:35 AM
Subject: Re: Kate Tempest etc
I
agree, very well put. Quite funny though that it should come under the heading
Kate Tempest etc.
Cheers
Tim
On 4 Oct 2014, at 07:39, David Bircumshaw wrote:
that is well put, Sean.