Sean,
You're not paying attention. You don't have to, but then don't make angry and false accusations.
I have made no references, if that's addressed to me, sniffy or otherwise, to racism in the avant-garde.
The SM reference has nothing to do with racism as I tried to explain, since you asked for an explanation. Someone changed the thread title, perhaps precisely to distinguish it from the thread about racism, to which you indignantly reconnected it.
The SM reference someone put in the thread title was a quote from an interview with Michael Donaghy in which he mentions a Mistress Someone or other and horsewhipping, silly enough as I said. We were discussing his view of the avant-garde, and not racism
and the avant-garde.
So now my attempt to explain this to you is cheap, very cheap indeed?
Jamie
Sent from my iPad
Read Fred Motem..Read him now. The 'avant-garde', especially since Fergusson, has been transformed completely, every idiot knows that. read M. NourbeSePhilip her book Zong, maybe read some David Marriot.
Definitely some Frank Wilderson. After that, stop being so sniffy about racism in the avant garde.
and Jamie - your SM reference is cheap. Very cheap indeed
Hi Sean,
I'd be only too glad to change the title of the thread. But although I have read Douglass, because the only reference was to SM practices, a silly enough metaphor in the context anyway, I never made, and doubt anyone
else made, the connection. Certainly it's tasteless if you make the connection.
Jamie
This slightly off-topic, but could someone explain why a thread that was originally about racism in the avant-garde been renamed "a good horsewhipping". Its incredibly tasteless - maybe some of you should
read Frederick Douglass' autobiography, in particular the scene when his Aunt Hester is whipped almost to death.
I am forced to chip in again, to say that a very great deal of the animosity shown by American poets to British poetry, which was sometimes total, was clearly because the poets were British, sometimes
explicitly so. I've pointed out this before -- there was a widespread polemic among such poets, especially among the less substantial figures, that said British poetry was finished for all sorts of ideological and cultural reasons, and for ever. I and my
associates met this again and again in the 1960s and later. It is probably still going strong in the academy, as old wasteful animosities tend to.
Also that I think it's quite all right to be not interested in Charles Olson (or anyone) without being accused of animosity or nationalism. The avant-grade does tend to assume that its programmes and lineages are sacrosanct and to disagree with any corner
of them must be an act of prejudice.
But I agree there was also an anti-American prejudice in some quarters, as when Donald Davie reviewing John Riley's Mandelshtam translations dismissed them for no good reason as "Americanised".
pr, hair also damp and disorderly
On 30 Aug 2015, at 10:58, Tim Allen wrote:
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
