Alan Halsey wrote:
"It seems to me, though, that both Other and Conductors of Chaos are much
more eclectic than reviewers like to suggest. Much more so than if they'd
been assembled 20 years ago; much more than, to take another important
anthology, A Various Art."
This is one of those things which, once I've read it, seems so bloody
obvious and yet seems to be the crucial missing component in many
discussions of innovative poetries. Although, of course, one has to ask
whether the taste of various editors is not also a significant factor. Maybe
Caddel/Quatermain's and Sinclair's own tastes are just more eclectic than
Crozier/Longville's? I'm still historically ignorant so would like to ask:
would an Other or a Conductors have been possible/impossible at an earlier
date?
But, Alan, being the gent of fine distinctions and scrupulous argument that
he is, raises the most important point of all: what is the mainstream? The
problem is that Movement-derived poetries have been and remain commercially
dominant. This is also part of the masking that Alan refers to.
He is also dead on re mainstream = commercially promoted. This is certainly
what happened post The New Poetry. The New Generation Poets promo was a
successful attempt to reinvent poetry as a commodity. I'd hazard - he says
putting on the blindfold and smoking his last cigarette against the wall
prior to be shot at from all four winds - that the best of the activity I
and my co-editors represented in TNP was a belated 'mainstream' equivalent
to Mottram's Revival 1960-75. The 'establishment' - a contingent grouping of
PoeSoc folk and London poetry editors - filled their designer panties and
reinvented the pluralism and fragmentation of the period 1982-9 - which
revealed important writers like Bill Herbert and Maggie Hannan - as
something with the politics taken out. But I too am rambling. Damn that
Stella!
cheers
David
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