In message <[log in to unmask]>, steve duffy
<[log in to unmask]> writes
>in as much as the poem conforms to "standard literacy" it is austerity
>itself. strategies of bold and italic and white space may be acceptable
>but that's as far as it goes in terms of risking "integrity".
>
>a "rich", (e.g. visual) language would compromise integrity and
>therefore must be resisted by poets who would follow the tradition of
>austerity. there are lots of "rich" poetries (the oral tradition, visual
>poetries, and etc) but these are not as _pure_ as "the real thing", the
>[plain] text.
>
>purity is important. the poem as pure text represents a culture which
>resists the technology of "rich" language.
>
Combining recent strands here, Steve, & allowing for the fact that I'm
just back from Saturday night in the pub & thus in a well-advertised
dangerous state, would you say therefore that the primacy accorded to
the book-as-object, as promoted in recent posts by cris & David Kennedy
(also by Geraldine a while ago, and I'd like to say silently by me since
my work becomes more & more geared to page- & book-design), is
fundamentally opposed to poetry-as-pure-text? I'm curious in so far as I
feel I could be accused of both tendencies: but I've never felt it's a
problem, or a real dichotomy. Maybe I just don't really grasp (I'm quite
seriously pissed, and puzzled too about David B[rom]'s request to play
my wife's jukebox) your distinction between 'rich' and 'pure' - to take
an example, I'd assume that Jeremy Prynne would be in your terms a
'pure' poet but there are works of his (I think particularly of _Into
The Day_) which in their original printed forms fall into both
categories: a 'pure' poetry given a 'rich' presentation which is lost in
the bland reprints: the loss, I think, is serious and yet not the result
of a dire contradiction. The text simply exists in two different states;
one I'd regard as 'richer' but wouldn't by the same token regard the
other as 'purer'.
Best, A
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