I am so far behind on this & perhaps others have already said this, ut:
among those 60s poets, Williams & then Creeley, Duncan, even Olson, had
an effect along with the NY poets. But at a distance, so that someone
like Adamson, who has written about this I think, & he is not alone,
was able to read the BM people, the NY folk, & also a number of poets
seen as at odds with them, & find them all generative (the geographical
& cultural distance being something akin to that of time?). In Canada,
we tended to choose a bit more specifically (we were nearer?), but a
sense of interaction has, as I've said before, tended to operate, so
that even today, in that latest anthology of CanPo published in the US,
the rage of poetics is very wide. I remember that I read the BMs (& for
me at that time, the Levertov of O Taste and See was perhaps the most
important [along with Phyllis Webb's Naked Poems in Canada]) but also
sought out, at least at first, Lowell, etc. The thing of it was that
for me, I felt I 'understood' Lowell's poems more than I did, say,
Olson's but Olson's excited me much more. And I didnt need to
'understand' them since I 'got' them somehow & they mattered to me in
terms of practice in a way the poems of such a Lowell simply did not.
My sense, from a very distant viewpoint, of OzPo is that once some of
the new american poetry got there it had a big effect, but only within
parameters already set by British poetry (as i understand it, most of
the US poetry that got to Australian shores before the 60s came through
London & its taste, so much more the Eliotian line, shall we say, than
the Pound-Williams one), &, of course, early 20th century Australian.
And, although perhaps not given major notice, there were a lot of
really interesting women writing & having an effect too (Dobson &
Wright, eg)...
But the major poet was after all the greatest 18th century poet of the
20th century, A D Hope....
Doug
On 28-Mar-06, at 2:20 PM, Jill Jones wrote:
> Although I think that, broadly, the New York poets (O"Hara more than
> Ashbery in some circles, I suspect) are and have been a big influence
> along one line of Australian poetry (ie, loosely speaking, one side of
> the poetry wars, the generation of 68 as it's often referred to), my
> feeling is that a great many Australian poets either still look to
> more the, and I'm probably being a little inaccurate here, Deep Image
> line (oh image is big big big for a lot of them) or the more trad look
> back to Blighty, though at that point I couldn't quite pinpoint to
> whom.
>
> There's a crowd that heads in the European and/or Spanish/Sth American
> direction as well, but that's a more recent push and they would come
> at that from varying other traditions or curricula, if you will. Way
> back Brennan, of course, was interested in the French symbolists and
> so there's another thread, which Adamson, to some extent, pulls into
> now.
Douglas Barbour
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