Robert's description of the North-East poetry of the 60's/70's as well as his mention of figures like Roy Fisher is something that I
would agree with, and that was perforce left out of my quick summary of things. But, my central point remains, that there is not a
coherent tradition of avant-garde poetry in Britain. The dominant tradition remains representational, sort of empiricist, vaguely
poetic in feel, tending towards sub-Wordsworthian notions of the real language of real men (or women!). Now to make that statement
is not to necessarily descry the work of such writers, some of them are very good, and a particular poem at times might demand such
an approach, but the problems are that, firstly, that posture rules out anything other than itself, so you end up with hordes of,
say, U.A.Fanthorpe clones but all Barry MacSweeney's disbarred, while, secondly, you also find yourself in a poetic world of awfully
nice people who live in our village, as it were. In the city pubs you might find the populist style performance poets, who have a
set-up that is just as excluding and reputation-led as the mainstream, and in reality just as neo-bourgeois. The avant-garde
situation meantime consists of disparate people flailing around in the dark without a focus for what they're after.
The mentions of the questions about the notion of 'canon' have been interesting, such doubts must cross anyone's mind, but who, in
honesty, reads, say, fourteenth century English poetry without an awareness of the 'canonical' importance of Chaucer and his later
influence on other writers? The problem of avant-garde writing in England remains, and has done for almost a century, as the
positions of people like Don P illustrate, because no coherent school of non-mainstream writing has ever been established,
individual writers, yes, but as always with England the push towards convention, convention often brilliantly executed, remains the
focus.
Best
Dave
David Bircumshaw
Spectare's Web, A Chide's Alphabet
& Painting Without Numbers
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
----- Original Message -----
From: "Hampson R" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, November 25, 2004 2:32 PM
Subject: Re: Performance Poetry
This is picking up on Tim's reference to the 'tail-end' of a Pound tradition
and David's suggestion that there is no coherent school of writing to take
one's bearings from.
With all respect to Tim, I think 'tail-end' is perhaps an unnecessarily
defeatist reading/ representation. I have a sense of a very rich and diverse
range of contemporary poetic practices coming out of the alternative
tradition, perhaps richer than at any time since the early 70s.
Eliot was right when he called Pound 'il miglior fabbro' - as we can see
from the job he did on editing The Waste Land to produce what was for long
the canonical poem of Modernism. This is also perhaps why 'the Pound
tradition' has been so much more productive than Eliot. Pound's own poetic
development took place in England from 1908 with his going to school to
Yeats and Ford (a very important and neglected influence on Pound's
development of imagism). Isn't this Pound becoming part of a native
tradition of writing? Alternatively, part of what Pound's example brings is
an openness to European and other literatures - a going beyond national
boundaries - as well as an openness to other art-forms. The 'Pound
tradition' includes Williams and Olsen - but also the Objectivists - Oppen,
Rakosi, Zukofsky - and Ford's editorial assistant, Basil Bunting. Bunting
and David Jones represented a second generation deriving from Pound/Eliot.
Bunting and the Objectivists were an important literary presence for
North-east poetry - Tom Pickard, Barry MacSweeney, John Seed ... not to
mention the way in which the British discovery of the Objectivists (most
obviously in Andrew Crozier's relation to Oppen) produced a re-flowering of
the work of the Objectivists in the 60s/70s. As with Pound earlier and
LANGUAGE writing later, there is a transatlantic dialogue not a
unidirectional flow. The late modernism of Roy Fisher similarly involved a
re-discovery of European modernism deflected through the North American
responses to it. This is not the 'tail end' of a tradition, implying some
kind of decadent slavish reproduction of Poundian modernism, but rather a
constantly developing alternative tradition, dialoguing with predecessors
(as early Allen Fisher dialogues with Pound and Olsen but also brings other
practices into the mix) and with transnational practices.
Robert
-----Original Message-----
From: david.bircumshaw [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday 24 November 2004 23:29 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Performance Poetry
Tim wrote:
>And as for their 'tradition'. Pound's tradition, or influence or legacy or
whatever else we can call it, is pretty much confined to those very schools
of
poetry and poetics that this list is supposed to be a tail-end of - not
exclusively I know, but still. And Eliot, as I've argued before, has
actually had
very little long-term influence on British poetry as a whole.<
Yes, this interesting, Eliot's reputation in his lifetime was somewhere off
the planet, and his influence as a critic and publisher
was enormous, but there's very little you point to as being of, as it were,
Eliotic descent. He's rather like a God figure nobody
wants to engage with. The more prolific Pound, although probably the lesser
poet, did leave odd lines of influence. Difficult,
innit? I think this is part of problem of discussing innovative or
avant-garde poetics in terms of British poetry, there is just not
a coherent school of writing to take one's bearings from, from the outset,
if you boil down twentieth century British and Irish
poetry you have as the two outstanding figures, oh fuck, Thomas Hardy or
Yeats, now neither Hardy's perceptual brilliance (vide
Larkin's take one down to a cul-de-sac) or Yeats' thumping enchanting
rhythms and occultist oddities leave one anywhere to go. In
the background stands the Reverend TSE (who is very vaguely a background to
Geoffrey Hill), Wystan chatting away brilliantly in
whatever verse form you can choose but with even less emotional involvement
than Dryden, Dylan Thomas spacing off into rhetoric, Ted
Hughes being dark about animals in an authentic Yorkshire accent, David
Jones being sonorously read by Richard Burton on BBC radio,
lots of people telling domestic stories, a whole new breed of professional
poets who defy any laws of economics, as hardly anyone
ever buys their professional productions, but they are Very Easy To Read, if
you bother, a disorganised avant-garde which doesn't
even know how to define itself, even in terms of what its against, and as
our Greatest Living of course the Famous Seamus, who, in
his own words, missed 'the comet's pulsing rose'.
Etc etc.
aaargh!!!!!
Best
Dave
David Bircumshaw
Spectare's Web, A Chide's Alphabet
& Painting Without Numbers
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
----- Original Message -----
From: <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, November 24, 2004 11:49 AM
Subject: Re: Performance Poetry
Rupert,
I want to pick up on a few more things you came back with. I'm not sure how
you got there, following your defence of 'Benji', but you ended up saying
that
we "now sustain a wholly cerebral tradition from Pound and Eliot".
Sorry, but I find that rather ridiculous, both from the point of view of
those names and this 'tradition'. Yes, both were cerebral, very learned and
intellectual, but their poetry was poetry. They used their intelligence in
conjunction with their emotions etc to produce poems. Those who try to read
The Waste
Land or the Cantos as purely cerebral projects will get very little from
either. And as for their 'tradition'. Pound's tradition, or influence or
legacy or
whatever else we can call it, is pretty much confined to those very schools
of
poetry and poetics that this list is supposed to be a tail-end of - not
exclusively I know, but still. And Eliot, as I've argued before, has
actually had
very little long-term influence on British poetry as a whole.
The other thing I want to pick up on is this:
>"Yet, seeing young performer Luke Wright, winner of the Glastonbury
Festival
2002 poetry slam, perform "hang your friends" recently was wonderful. Cooper
Clarke and Attila - and that whole doggerel quick fire delivery was broken.
It
was Chris Morris meets poetry. For me, this is real hope."<
I witnessed Luke recently too, and heard him do 'Hang Your Friends'. Yes, i
was impressed, both by him and his mates in Aisle 16 - or two of them
anyway.
Luke is a brilliant performer and Hang Your Friends is very very funny, his
best. But some of his other pieces were a lot less cohesive, a lot more
sloppy,
with whole batches of lines that were no more than filler in-between the
sharp
ones. And he did - I say 'did' and not 'read' - a poem that had the refrain
'Sooo Channel 4' which I found to be nothing but surface attitude: a very
basic
and already cliched idea, about Channel 4 being for the middle classes who
are trying to be trendy, delivered maniacally. So, ok, I loved the manic
delivery, but that was all, the words could have been anything, meant
anything, but
it was done in the sort of way that said those words, that message, was
everything. Poetry as scatter-gun - the targets don't really matter as long
as there
are targets - what matters is the grounding of the refrain, the repetition
of
the line that is supposed to give focus and body to whatever nonsense or
inconsequence lies in-between - slave to a formula. We have got to be able
to take
each poem on its merits, to judge them for their satirical and entertaining
impact, how much they make us think, how much they resonate. 'Hang Your
Friends'
resonates, makes us laugh and think, while the channel 4 poem says and does
nothing, unless it is appealing in that formulaic way to a listener who does
not really care, or does not have the sensors to note the difference, in
which
case it will all be of one anyway. Within the context of performance it does
not seem to matter, and that is the problem with performance poetry - I do
not
know what the answer to it is. Because the parameters of judgement remain
gross
- loudest, sexiest etc - progress will remain stunted.
Tim A.
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