I don't know what sort of first year undegraduates you know Kit, but i
wouldn't class Gough's essay as a first year effort, no way. Post grad maybe
or a very talented and experienced newbie in the grove.
And whilst not advocating that every point Gough makes as an invioable
truth, the basic point he makes is interesting, even if one takes a
differing position intellectually.
It is my current position that knowledge in the humanities can only ever be
subjective and based on ones personal belief, itself based on what structure
of faith one creates through reading and experience. Look at all the
scientific untruths that were considered as gospel fact until - historically
- very very recent times in human history, when the sciences supplanted the
humanites as the main discipline of knowledge that has most material affect
on our lives.
The corrollary of this stance - adopted for the purpose of engaging with you
as a fellow colleague on the bore-floe of aural utterance - is that all our
musings and proclomations on Art, be they a meek and timid stated truth or
an arrogantly boomed falsehood, can only ever be the unique - or not -
synaptic emanations of our intelligence.
Indeed Ms Fryatt, the logic of this stand-point suggests that any
declaration we make on poetry is but a conceptual Art, occuring in the
swirling ether of our interior play-pen where we ponder on the letter-game.
And the reason i am with gough on wishing to trash the "wangst" of unhappy
sad sods moaning that tragedy is the higher form of utterance, is because of
the Amergin text heading the Auraicept Na N-eces in the Book of Ballymote,
the most reliable material from the bardic - as well as any other poetic -
tradition in existence, which explains exactly what the poetic gift is and
how it works, from the perspective of a 7C poet with many generations of
poets behind him and many more to come.
Amergin says that poetry exists as
"..active voice, in passive silence, in the neutral balance between," and
"in the proper construction of rhyme,"
And from my understandiong the word "fili" or poet, is a combination of "fi"
meaning splendour, praise, good looking etc, and "li" which means poison,
relating to satire etc.
Amergin basically says that the wider the experience of joy and sorrow one
has, then the more potential one possesses to become an ollamh, singing from
the higher streams and peaks of poetical thought. I don't think this is a
material existential "truth," but a creative one, which i have conjoured
over 6 years of study, 12 hours a day 7 days a week, until two months ago
when i began, what i like to imagine, is the final stage, which came in the
form of a 320 page outpouring of comment on the guardian books blog.
For the last two months i have been tousling out my final-stage thoughts,
going from Anruth to Ollamh.
This last leg process started at the guardian books blog because Blakean
scholar and the laughably titled "Battle Co-ordiantor" of the "Institute of
Ideas" Shirely Dent, slagged off the Love Poetry Hate Racism poetry events
which happened in March and in which i was involved.
I trashed her completely with top grade satire
"Will the psychological battle axe of effable Shirl swing once more in the
trench of literature.." sort of caper.
It was a few days later the Julian Gough article appeared and basically
saying what I had been trying to achieve, and I hung around for two months,
garnering support and hammering the trolls who tried and failed to best me.
But this is not about me Ms Fryatt. If you are in Dublin this Wednesday
after 9pm, come to Carnival on Wexford Street. I am guest reader and can
wangle you a spot on the open mic if you promise to be my friend and have a
laugh.
Seriously though, I want to have a spot at the MacNeice conference at queens
and need a 200 word abstract for next week or so, and would be very grateful
for a potted precis of what the current state of thinking is on him.
I saw Matterson from Trinners do his Auden lecture and learnt more in 3/4 of
an hour from him than i have from any book.
Any help will be re-paid, we are poetical people and the law of karmic
return is in play, surely?
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