> This is the legacy of Conquest

Don Paterson's list does sound quite depressing. What about the creative writing syllabuses? My bug with what I'm sitting is that there's no discussion of what makes any / a poem a success or failure. Let alone trying to emulate those qualities. We only discuss "what works", in our work or in a poem.

Luke

On Sun, Sep 24, 2017 at 1:31 PM, Peter Riley <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

On 24 Sep 2017, at 10:58 am, [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

I'm unconvinced that such supine audiences still exist. Most people, if they like modern poetry at all, tend to be pretty passionate about it, and not likely to take anthologies as authoritative.

I certainly hope so. Anthologies have rarely been anything but a pain. The canonical ones— well, who needs a canon? The mapping never covered more than a quarter of the globe and if used for navigation risked getting caught up in whirlpools. . Probably the anthology I’ve used most was Allen's New American Poetry of 1960, but after  two or three years the question was mainly one of finding out who wasn’t in it. A third kind, the polemical, which intends to capture a particular shift in the poetry scene, is valuable or not according to where you stand. It needs to be explicit. Conquest was one of these and did a lot of damage by decimating the mainstream and reducing it to a mere slice of itself, which then became “what was happening”.  Children of Albion was one of the worst. “People Michael Horowitz met in pubs” as someone said at the time.  A Various Art  was a welcome break but as Tony said, grimly insisted on the Cambridge belief that you must never under any circumstances explain anything. It was salutary for the first generation but wobbly in the extension to a few younger poets. Chinese anthologies based on subjects, such as daffodils or butterflies, seem a much better idea. 

Each evening this week on Radio 3, Don Paterson can be heard “reflecting” on “Five Poems I Wish I’d Written.” They are by Seamus  Heaney, Elisabeth Bishop, Michael Donaghy, Sylvia Plath and Robert Frost. This is the legacy of Conquest, the obstinacy of staying on safe ground.  Even the big-poetry-prize scene is generous and encouraging compared with this, in spite of all the show-biz. 

;pr