On 4/28/06, joe green <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> So in re the Japanese poet hoax. Who was harmed?
>
Oh, no one was harmed. But that I think that shows how small the whole
Yasusada affair was and is. Here
http://jacketmagazine.com/05/yasu-larsen.html Kent Johnson has the
chutzpah - something which he's not short of - to compare Y with Ern
Malley. Stewart and McAuley - the authors of Ern Malley - almost
destroyed the career of one their targets, Max Harris (who was
published in The Jindyworobaks btw), and probably set back the cause
of modernism in Australia.
One aspect of the EM affair seems to echo with Y. Kent Johnsons
"puncturing" US academia's "political correctness" seems to align him
right-ways in the political spectrum; if that's where he wants to sit,
fair enough. I'll sit somewhere else, thankyou.
In another respect, Y suffers. The Ern Malley poems seem to have
become celebrated in their own right with their website even,
http://www.ernmalley.com/index.html. I think I'm right in saying that
Stewart and McAuley lived to regret their creation.
Can you point me at a place where KJ has admitted to authoring the
hoax, please? Google doesn't seem to know of this event, so it must be
in a magazine article. Sorry to be such a fuss-pot but K's history and
the Y affair doesn't lead one to trust any assertions made about it.
In those days when KJ was trumpeting Y on poetryetc, I was often
tempted to ask for Y's death certificate.
As to Jon Silkin, even the great Goethe was taken in, at first, by
Ossian and it didn't seem to do G any harm.
Roger
--
http://www.badstep.net/
http://www.cb1poetry.org.uk/
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