I think, then, we are in agreement about self-vaunting in this particular instance. We might even be approaching some degree of convergence about what we started off calling ‘anecdotal’. I would agree that personal experience and even authentication by the appeal to authorial experience (‘I have seen the best minds of my generation …’) might be perfectly respectable procedures, but it is then a question of the approach to that material.
I like John’s ‘the burden of exemplariness’. After an earlier email, I realised later that the examples of 1970s poetry I was citing were the ones that had stayed with me. I had forgotten all the Larkin, for instance, where one the problems for me was not accepting that claimed ‘exemplariness’ …
Robert
From: British & Irish poets [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Peter Riley
Sent: 01 December 2014 14:51
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: the avant garde vs. the lyrical: stafford
Actually that Stafford poem increasingly irritates me, and largely because of the undercurrent of self-vaunting. I think Robert is right about it. But my question was: what's actually wrong with the "anecdotal", is it necessarily thus? and obviously it isn't (e.g. WC Williams), and is not an authentication of the poem by appeal to authorial experience a perfectly respectable procedure for some kinds of poem? And what has the concept "mainstream" got to do with any of this? Simon Armitage's work does not strike me as founded on anecdote, nor is it heavily mediated through the first person singular. Its problems are quite elsewhere.
I have never thought of you as an avant-gardist, John! And if you were one you'd be one of the genial ones. I was using the reply-to system to pick up various dangling threads. But does your experience of "Cambridge" tally with mine at all?
AT a hazard I venture to say that the effort is not to separate the ethical and the aesthetic, since they naturally occur separately, they are distinct concepts. The effort is to relate them to each other responsibly, and I have increasingly grown to distrust a poetic which just goes straight from one to the other like turning a page as if there is no problem. So you do your aesthetic thing (e.g. poetry of ugliness and gratuitous violence) and voilá you've got your ethic done for you (e.g. revolutionary politics) or just make a mess of some kind and you're immediately there with a public statement of protest. As if you can use poetry to be political without needing to think right through your politics as practice as well as theoretic.
Peter
On 1 Dec 2014, at 14:05, Hall, John wrote:
Am I here being responded to as a stand-in avant-gardist, rehearsing yet
another denigration of a despised category of poet? If so, almost every
part of that feels quaint and I must go back to shutting up.
I think I first encountered the Stafford poem in an old style Critical
Quarterly pamphlet called American Poetry 1965, which I have just re-found
in my shelves, and may well not have read since that year. I read the poem
carefully again because I wanted to know what had stayed with me all those
years to the extent that it immediately came to mind when Robert gave his
brief indication. It seems as though I like it rather more than you do.
First-person pluralling, which I picked out as of especial interest to me,
is certainly not confined to the alleged lyrical mainstream. ¡®We¡¯ and
¡®our¡¯ may well be a lot more troublesome than ¡®I¡¯.
In your own work, Peter, how easy is it to keep apart the ¡®moral¡¯ and the
¡®aesthetic¡¯?
John
On 01/12/2014 12:56, "Peter Riley" <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
I don't want to make any big claims for the Stafford poem. It's
pedestrian and it does one of the unforgivable things in my book, it
interrupts itself to explain the circumstances. When that happens the
poetry, even the gentlest depictive poetry, has to stop until it can
be resumed. Jaime's prose sketch was more touching. What worries me is
the terms under which the avant-garde attacks poetry such as this,
which is always moral rather than aesthetic, and assumptive concerning
what is transmitted. For a century or so the avant-garde (which I'm
using as a blanket term) has claimed moral high ground on the basis
either of political rectitude or the status of the selfhood in the
poem, sometimes cunningly encompassing both at once. Mere self-
referral is read as inevitably self-centering or selfishness thus a
sign of bad character. so poems are dismissed as "good guy" poems. And
yet the history of the avant-garde displays a collection of some of
the greatest egotists of the century (also greatest snobs and greatest
bullies) accompanied by a mass of extremely bad political thinking.
As John knows as well as I, those who have been through "Cambridge"
have been taught to disdain the genial in poetry and denigrate all
merely social virtues, and to present an aggressive or a least
rebarbative surface to the reader, attitudes inherited from Wyndham
Lewis (Artist as Enemy) as well as Leavis, which persist and are
increasingly strong not just in ex-Cambridge, where they think they
are soldiers for the right, but in just about the whole of the avant-
garde. (except the good guys).
pr
On 29 Nov 2014, at 10:00, Hall, John wrote:
Whether it makes any difference in the case of this particular poem is
one
thing, whether it ever makes any difference another. The appeal to the
authority of personal experience is often a strong rhetorical tactic and
of course not just in poetry. As a mode it places the vulnerability of
the
speaker/writer in the position of human shield for language. It is
praised, is it not, as Œauthenticity©ö and for its courage, which is
often
real enough. As has been mentioned it can also be scorned as mere
anecdotalism, argument founded on case studies of one, and those perhaps
as trustworthy as Andrew Mitchell©ös. (Incidentally the etymology of
anecdote is, apparently, Œnot published©ö. On that basis once an anecdote
is published it loses its right to the designation!)
In Stafford©ös poem it seems to me that the crux lies not in the first
person singular but in the first person plural. It only becomes apparent
towards the end that the ŒI©ö is not alone in the scene, with first Œthe
car ahead©ö and then Œour group©ö. The second last line is where I suspect
that its popularity ¡© I think it is a popular poem ¡© arises:
I thought hard for us all¡©¡©my only swerving.
This implies that there is a lot at stake in I's decision, whose
implications go well beyond this Œwilderness©ö; I feels the burden of
exemplariness, which may be one of the (welcome) burdens of a particular
kind of lyric poem. This incident is Œfor us all©ö. Does it matter
whether
or not the incident actually occurred to the assembler of these words?
If
it didn©öt then the assumption of priestly authority ¡© the one authorised
to conduct sacrifice ¡© is the more extreme. I think it matters only to
that extent. And as you imply, Peter, without searching outside the
poem,
how could we know? I suspect that the force of the poem depends just as
much on the retrieval of the word Œswerving©ö, which has earlier been
used
unmetaphorically for the risk to drivers©ö lives of a dead animal left on
this particular road. It returns metaphorically as an ethical term, and
leaves hanging in the poem an equivocation about all that thought Œfor
us
all©ö.
Is there a whole genre, not quite coinciding with what people might or
might not be meaning by Œlyric©ö, that could be called the homiletic? The
incident is the text for the day. This is how I recall the (Anglican)
sermons of my childhood.
All best,
John
On 28/11/2014 20:28, "Peter Riley" <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
I can't see how it makes any difference whatsoever whether this
incident actually happened to Stafford or not. And how would we know
anyway? When we speak of "poetry of personal [sc. authorial]
experience" are we not actually speaking of narrative poetry as such?
Of story? Which is certainly not restricted in usage to any fictional
mainstream.
PR
On 28 Nov 2014, at 20:09, Hall, John wrote:
William Stafford, Travelling through the Dark??
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171495.
Now where did that come from?
John
On 28/11/2014 19:38, "Hampson, R" <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
