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An influential mainstream of anti-modernist lyric writing strives, with powerful support from the nationally determined school syllabus, to sustain a populist tradition of casually accessible lyric writing: Andrea Brady has characterised its products as "poems which are appropriate to a famished definition of poetry... which exhibits obvious 'technique' in its use of regular meters, meek in politics, pithy, witty, accommodating." Its adherents are to be found reviewed or featured in the press, are likely to be sponsored by the British Council and to receive literary prizes and other accolades; they constitute, on the whole, the official, conventional force of English poetry.
There was a great performance by Steve McCaffery of the Toronto telephone book at a conference some years back in Leicester.
My own resistance to the term lyric was probably prompted by Pound/Olson - and the 'Projective Verse' essay: 'Objectism is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego ... that peculiar presumption by which western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature ... and those other creations of nature which we may, with no derogation call objects'.
Apologies if this has already been brought into the discussion.
Robert
-----Original Message-----
From: British & Irish poets [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jamie McKendrick
Sent: 25 November 2014 17:51
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: the avant garde vs. the lyrical
I'm still interested. And should repeat that my citing of Andrew Duncan wasn't intended to assign any blame - au contraire. Even if I'm unconvinced by his analysis, which I see no reason (pace Tim) to think doesn't represent his actual view, I'm grateful for the clear statement of it, that might have been fudged by another critic.
I'm also, with Peter I think, not inclined to see the 'lyrical' as necessarily belonging to any school or denomination, and though wary of the term unwilling to see it abandoned. Just doubling back a bit on what I said earlier, like Tim though possibly in different zones, I do have a reaction against a kind of faux lyricism, which usually amounts to tedious rehearsal of 'natural' tropes.
And yet here, hi Michael, the use of 'expressive' is even less clear to me than 'lyrical'. Of course we can say that "every artifact is..cantabile..."
but that seems equivalent to the remark that Van Morrison's voice could turn the phonebook into a great lyric or that Italian street signs sung would sound like opera. If a phonebook is considered lyrical per se then the category has been obliterated and the praise for Van Morrison is lost.
But I'm also still interested, and this connects to your earlier post, in anti-lyrical poems that enter into a dialectic - but that too requires a shared notion of the lyrical which they're reacting against...
Jamie
-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Tuesday, November 25, 2014 11:31 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: the avant garde vs. the lyrical
In case there's anyone left who isn't fed up with this topic!
I saw this in a helpful review by blogger Gareth Prior of Andrea Brady's Cut
From The Rushes:
...The poems are a response to their own times enacted in the language
rather than simply communicated through the language.
In this Brady is a lyric poet as much as she is an experimental one (to the
extent that either category is useful beyond the world of publishers’
catalogues and review shorthand). Her poems maintain a powerful creative
tension between a modernist distrust of meaning and the urgency of direct
communication, and in doing so manage to synthesize the best of two very
different traditions. ....
http://garethprior.org/the-fault-of-language-andrea-brady/
Don't mean to dig too critically into Gareth's meaning - he seems to be
emphasizing the expressive element of "lyrical" here. (as opposed to
personal or melodious; though all three are connected, of course) . I share
his parenthetical unease about the term, i.e. I never find "lyrical" much
use when I'm writing about poetry. Possibly this is because of the view I
already expressed that every artefact has the potential to be viewed as
expressive, cantabile and personal.
What Gareth does register, as this discussion has done, is a widespread
tendency to use lyrical and experimental as contrasted terms. That seems
totally unhelpful to me. In most obvious senses Maggie O'Sullivan is far
more "lyrical" than Peter Porter. If Andrew Duncan must bear the blame for
that, his shoulders are broad enough, but I guess it didn't start with him -
I'd like to know the history of this idea.