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The ego never really goes despite our efforts to try to sidetrack it from our consciousness when writing leaving total objectivity impossible in any field of human endeavour.  The crux of the human condition is our frailty as well as our need to survive in a hostile universe with our inevitable mortality totally certain and final. Birth has been addressed in Andrea Brady's own poetic work in a way I have not seen in any female poet since I first read Judith Wright in the sixties. Brady tackles it head-on with nothing excluded leaving her reader amazed by her honestly and lyricism. A male's role in the actual birth process is supportive solely for obvious reasons. To me Olson arrived first via anthology inclusions in the sixties and into the seventies but the New York School got more media coverage. Frank O' Hara made a huge impression as well as others of his era with David Trinidad of the second or third wave of the New York School tradition making an impact equal to O' Hara's via his "Hand On Heart" book. 


These examples are all diverse and all bar the Australian Wright are American poets which might indicate a bias but all mean a lot in 2014. For to look afresh at these islands I pinpoint Peter Riley's "Green Van" or "The Green Van" published in Tim Longville's G. Review as a superb work on the human condition.  It involves a journey with his family from Cambridge to West Kerry in Ireland in a van via road and ferry. I regret that it has not been seen in book form to the best of my knowledge. My angle in citing this work is Riley along with the others I have mentioned is not bogged down in the limited world of sociology which in theory plays far too much a role across the artistic and media spectrum. Our role in nature is much more minor than we think as the debunking of "a nuclear winter" proved and in time the sun will devour the planet we dwell on. Our universe is nuclear yet we have objections to building smelters + windfarms and nuclear power stations often purely to protect property values.




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-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Allen <[log in to unmask]>
To: BRITISH-IRISH-POETS <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thu, Nov 27, 2014 12:50 PM
Subject: Re: the avant garde vs. the lyrical:the telephone book


Ah, at last, a bit of nitty-gritty below. Thanks Robert. Hence Peter's "I have seldom seen so much "peculiar presumption" crammed into one sentence as there is here!"

Robert, a historical question then - How much did the poetic ideology of the Poetry Revival (and their satellites) depend on Olson etc. I have always been confused by the competing influences of Zeitgeist and theory - the chicken and egg stuff. Back in the late 60's when I was beginning to write poetry I had never even heard of Olson, let alone any theory.

Cheers

Tim
 
On 27 Nov 2014, at 11:55, Hampson, R wrote:

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'.