Hi Tim, while I'm mulling over Jeremy's interesting question about what in the last 5 years is fit for salvage - a good gambit perhaps to move things on - I'm tempted back into the fray.
With one possible exception, there has been absolutely no hostility to Olson and Creeley's poetry that I have ever read or overheard in all my contacts with mainstream poets which have been numerous over more than 30 years. Whether they are enthusiastic, indifferent or ignorant about this tradition I couldn't say either. Maybe it's this lack of response and engagement that you're complaining about?
Speaking for myself and judging from statements from many poets of my and the next generation, being American would be likely to be a bonus not a minus. Within the vague contours of the mainstream, Bishop, Lowell, Berryman, O'Hara, Seidel, Simic, and many others, are frequently and enthusiastically praised. Not to mention the earlier generation of Stevens, Crane, Moore, W C Williams etc. It looks to me like a sad and unrequited love (judging, as I think Peter also was, by the general lack of US interest in British poetry.
Again Tim we've had this discussion about mainstream poets slagging off the avants. I could think of only two examples, Paterson's intro to that US anthology and a Maxwell article in the TLS. Now we can add Donaghy whose views were close to Paterson's. Really nothing else that I've read or heard. There may be hostility but I'd be interested to hear where you've come across it.
From the days of Crozier, some 40 years ago, who actually argued it more subtly, the same caricature of mainstream poetry has been recurrent - Movement-based, anecdotal, insular, sub-realist etc etc. For me the lowest level is reached when publishers are slagged off. I think it's the worst kind of philistinism and one that's just a step up from suggesting that books be burnt. Perhaps this will seem interested on my part, as I publish with Faber and Bloodaxe, but I'm fairly indifferent to the team strip. As well as poets whose work I admire, there are a number of poets on both lists whose work I don't much care for, but they're not homogenous. Faber for example has had five different editors since I began reading poetry and their tastes are very distinct. Anyway I wouldn't accuse you of this kind of silly partisanship but it's all over the internet.
In an attempt to have a life beyond this fiddle, I ventured outside. Appropriately enough a thorn has entered a knuckle joint and I can't open my hand or clench my fist...is that an epiphany I see materializing?
Jamie
Sorry, hair is still not dry.
I've always said that a big part of the animosity shown towards the poetry of Creeley and Olson by the mainstream Brits (and believe me, that animosity is still alive and kicking) is because they were Americans. It probably was not consciously so but that of course makes it all the more difficult to deal with. There was plenty of other American poetry of course but what came out of the modernists was something that had shifted a long way from English models and found its own feet, influenced by different things (as Peter has pointed out, the French). Then part of that animosity was naturally transferred to those poets in their own country who were obviously enthused by the Americans - then hey diddle diddle the game begins.
Peter Riley has of course expressed his own negative views on this.
The part that Beat poetry played was, because of its wider popularity, a rather different thing to deal with.
Now where is that hair brush?
On 29 Aug 2015, at 16:31, Jeremy F Green wrote:
whether we're talking about Creeley, Olson, Clark Coolidge (I'll come back to him), Rosemary Tonks, Basil Bunting or Denise Riley—is not one thing, and to imply that it's all avant-garde (insert scare quotes) is an example of the dubious part-for-whole illogic that characterizes this entire phantasmagoric debate