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I think Lawrence is right to pick Douglas up on using some strong, hurtful language about Out of Everywhere. But I do think it's a book that's a marker of "our" "community" and its own involvement in falling out with the Poetry Society: namely, over different takes on the self-evident. Out of Everywhere, to me, is a great magazine number of recent work by poets known to its editor, and to many of its readers, including me; it isn't, in my opinion, so good as an anthology, esp. since no anthology like of it of poets in it exists. It doesn't have introductory work, it doesn't have representative work; when I think of a good *anthology* of that sort, of Language Writing, by men and women, I think of In The American Tree. I think Conductors of Chaos has similar flaws *as an anthology* to O o E (*I* own both books, and *like* them, but I knew the poets already). As to Hughes' book, it's hard for me to avoid being as dismissive as Douglas about O o E. Birthday Letters has been hyped much as Monica thingy in the Clinton case, by report of the content, in my opinion. I think the actual work is really lacking any sense of Hughes' agency, in any way, in his wife's pain; his is the love that did its best with her pre-existent pain? A little, yes, and by the evidence of her work too. But Hughes in BL is really copping out, I think, and with no room *at all* for looking at any dark complicity, any sin, any badness on his part, even if "only" youthful (and there is nothing in the book that shows his constructed youthfulness being a pre-existent pain, something that could have been avoided, something he might have dedicated his life to remedying, in himself and others, over this tragic loss. Instead, his masculinity is simply naturalised and the book is mostly reminiscences of a young youthful mad bad dangerous etc love affair, with which people can identify in plaintive faux-naif passively rapturous banalities. The energy and the demons (to think of Barry MacSweeney) that are the best of Hughes' flawed work are much better in the non-personal public work like Rain Charm for the Duchy; the Laureateship produced the little work of his I like, taking on the public poem and making it dark and sinister. When Hughes does "private" work, of the self in rapture, of anecdote, it is by contrast bright and clean, and easily resolved, not half so disturbing as Rain Charm, or the mass acceptance of this new, pernicious book. Ira P.S. The Times, who seem to care so much for this *literary* event of the decade, couldn't proof forty lines of verse last Wednesday and printed the line "WE WERE GONG TO BE MARRIED" Gong! By far the best line in the work (it's "going" in the Faber book), because its linguistic energy even as a joke disturbs the pious (but not repenting) tone. On Tue, 27 Jan 98 14:54:12 GMT Douglas Clark wrote: > From: Douglas Clark <[log in to unmask]> > Date: Tue, 27 Jan 98 14:54:12 GMT > Subject: Re: Hughes does America > > Lawrence asks me to pick some poets out of `out of everywhere'. Here goes: > > Lyn Hejinian > Rosmarie Waldrop > Lisa Robertson > Barbara Guest > > and that's about it. E&OE. Now back to re-reading the Ted Hughes. > My mainstream instincts bear out. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%