These accounts do attest to hostility and/or incomprehension. I could add some of my own, and a fair few encountered on this list. But I was more wondering about the public zone – specifically, having seen no negative remarks about Olson and Creeley, where that had cropped up. Or the anti-Americanism. Perhaps a futile thing to pursue. The division exists – and probably several other bitter ones within the opposing camps. I’m not seeking to abolish it, rather questioning whether it’s of much use or significance. The phantasmal elements – as I take Jeremy to have meant – feed on themselves and just keep it batting to and fro. I didn’t understand him to be saying there were no real reasons for the opposition.

   Mark’s response to my list of US poets was centred on academic curricula. My own interests were extra-curricular. The academy’s important in choosing what is or isn’t studied, but I’m more interested, if it’s true that Schuyler and Ashbery are read on either side of the divide, in whether they’re being read in different ways. Likewise, not just because of who publishes them or who teaches them, why Berryman’s Dream Songs and Dorn’s Gunslinger have to be seen as aesthetically opposed. ‘Aesthetically’ is bad shorthand here but it’ll have to do. In Berryman’s poem the ‘blackface’ side of Henry and the crude racial stereotyping it involves makes him deeply problematic, especially in the context of what we’ve just been talking about, but I’m thinking more specifically about what Kleinzahler calls his “eccentric, syncopated mash-up of traditional measures and contemporary vernacular energy, an American motley with Elizabethan genes”.

Jamie

  

Yes oh yes. I've experienced my share of such encounters (all phantoms of my imagination of course).