Thanks Alison - you made some of the points that I wanted to make reading
Daves response to 'Warming Her Pearls'
I dont want to be pushed into the position of fan club leader for Carol
Ann - I do like this poem, but I dont think it is the best thing ever
written. I think it was Robin's Ex Wife who referred to her as a 'great'
poet. I am not much interested in establishing hierchies or oppositions. I
just respond to the poems and in some ways find them satisfying. And I want
to explore that honestly without imposing a rigid framework over a fragile
structure. It is easy to crush a poem by doing that.
Part of the resonance of the poem is the way that it expressed something
about lesbian desire that in my experience the dyke community recognised and
responded to. I have seen this poem passed from hand to hand, heard women
talking about it between pints in Vanilla. Good for her - I find that a
pretty contemporary intervention!
The link here between issues of form and the politics of 'criticism' is very
interesting. The language of the poem is deliberately flat and cliched.
Where the poems works for me is in creating layers of irony and silence
around the well worn phrases and images. For example in the line that David
quotes "She fans herself/ whilst I work willingly," There is tension there
surely between the words and the reader's reception of them?
Certainly a reader can insist the poem is flat, uninteresting and
derivative. And so it will be. Its a kind of readerly decision, and very
deeply shaped by the reader's own position. I can see you dislike the poem
Dave (!) - fair enough, and I dont feel any need to persuade you to like it.
I am just enjoying trying to explore what _is_ there in the language and see
what I can learn from it.
One of the things that becomes even more clear to me as this discussion goes
on, is that I dont want to write like Carol Ann Duffy!
Liz
(back to work tomorrow - I probably wont be able to contribute much once I
am doing six hours of teaching a day again, but I shall still be here,
reading thinking enjoying the list and all its glories!)
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