Doug
I was suffering partly from late-night irritation in the post you refer to,
but also I was simply trying to put a non-US centric perspective on things.
I recently saw a post elsewhere where a writer was congratulated for
importing work from the 'periphery' into the 'centre'. The work concerned
was translations of poems from such unknown places as Russia, Japan and
ancient Greece (!) - these forming into the 'periphery' into unremarkable US
English. I deeply hope the post was a joke.
I could mention other writers of not so political an ilk - Ungaretti, Celan,
Bobrowski, Cavafy, Saba, Machado, or take a Russian of the emigre
persuasion, the wonderful Khodasevich. And I'd guess the greatest post-war
_American_ poem of all remains Neruda's Canto General, altho' I know that
_is_ political. For sure, the US has produced many good poets, particularly
women, that I regard as its real distinctiveness, but so much US poetry is
college copycat. One the vilest things I have seen was a supposed elegy for
his father by a well-known US poet that was no more than a rip-off of
Lorca's great lament for the bullfighter. This poem was anthologised in a
prestigious collection of post-war US poetry.
I'm sure too that there are writers in non-European languages equally worthy
of praise, I am limited by my ignorance there not I hasten to add a
Euro-centricism. You'll notice I mention no English writers in this context,
I'm not lapsing into nationalism.
Best
Dave
David Bircumshaw
Leicester, England
Home Page
A Chide's Alphabet
Painting Without Numbers
www.paintstuff.20m.com/index.htm
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/index.htm
----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas Barbour" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2001 3:02 PM
Subject: Re: (no subject)
> David
>
> I'm definitely not jumping on Frederick's pro-US bandwagon (I have my
> problems with US policy, as do we all; not the reaction to the fall of the
> towers, but the way an administration I find definitely troubling has been
> able to turn that horror to their advantage in order to continue its
> ideological attack on a large number of its own people while also more or
> less ignoring the rest of he world unless it's 'onside'), but I wonder if
> you have encountered (or encountered then) all the great postwar US
poetry?
> I will say that a lot of the poetry that actually made it to GB through
the
> mainstream venues wasn't to my eyes & ears all that interesting or at all
> the best of what was happening, but a lot of other writing was (well,
> admittedly, it was highly influential on my own).
>
> Not to take anything away from the writers of Russia, or an Octavio Paz,
> that you mention, but... -- is it that so many US poets of the time did
not
> appear to be 'political' in the way the writers you mention seem to be?
>
> Doug
>
> Douglas Barbour
> Department of English
> University of Alberta
> Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
> (h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
>
> I can always
> go back to
> fertilization,
> kimonos, wrap-
> arounds and
> diatribes.
> Lorine Niedecker
>
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