But I spelt Patterson wrong, leaving off the extra t – especially significant in the context – and adding an extra s to disassembling – if it’s even a word.
J
From: Andrew Bailey
Sent: Thursday, November 27, 2014 5:18 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: the avant garde vs. the lyrical:the telephone book
Hi -
Jamie had it right on the assignation - everything in mine is a quote, from Patterson's essay, who has in turn a quote from Brady embedded. There's quite a chunk of it here: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=LQj3AQAAQBAJ&lpg=PA217&ots=TZbNtu_c85&dq=ian%20patterson%20no%20man%20is%20an%20i%20lyric&pg=PA217#v=onepage&q=british%20council&f=false (not the paragraph I quoted, sadly).
I didn't wholly feel equipped to comment on it; still, yes, the Brady part is combative, but it's in response to the Don Paterson Graywolf introduction that has probably been discussed here before I was on the list. That probably bears as much weight as any "but they started it!" argument ever does, of course. I liked that the first response was 'is it true?', too; I know I've read things recently that fell into that description, but that's not to drag every connected author with them. Initially though it was just that it seemed to be speaking to Carrie's original query about this distinction between the lyric and the modernist. If I'd been smarter I might have contextualised that better in my previous, sorry.
best - a
On 27 November 2014 at 16:54, [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Hi Tim and Sean,
It is possible to see a poem that is free of any ego as simply one part of a complex-- the narcissistic side, or self-invested side, remaining hidden. Such a poem is lopsided in its
presentation --truncating the field as it were, if one were to speak in the vein of Olson-- though one can usually feel something of what has been left out, precisely because the field is the field.
I am always surprised at this when I notice it, as I can imagine a poetry that describes the ego accurately to be as harrowing and enlightening as any undertaken, and one suitable for both a new kind of lyric and as a project worthy of an avant garde.
David
On Nov 27, 2014, at 3:46 PM, Tim Allen wrote:
Yes, but there's still a difference between the ego being present within a poem and the ego remaining outside a poem, by which I mean we can write a poem which has no 'self' in it at all but about which we can feel very proud etc. We can be subjectively ego-centric about our objectivity.
I also like it when writers are objective about their nature as subjects, and I think a lot of the stuff I personally rate highly does that somehow.
Tim
On 27 Nov 2014, at 14:33, Sean Carey wrote:
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.
--
Andrew Bailey
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Zeal (Enitharmon, 2012)
