It's very interesting, Jeffrey, good interview, and thanks for the link.
I have one or two areas of unease, or ponderous pondering, clumping
about with tired heavy feet among the tracts all these wearying
forever-present 'issues', as it were:
a) I receive an impression that poetry reviewing really ought to be in
the hands of 'experts'. Comparisons are made with the reviewing of art
and architecture. It comes to my thoughts that architecture is a
specialism that more often displays disregard for its victims than
not, the comparison is not a happy one. The major architecture
practices are inarguably high-end capitalist affairs disassociated
from locality and community, and their work shows that.
b) she clearly doesn't love those mainstream British types she
mentions like Glyn Maxwell and Clive James (she calls him British,
btw, formerly Aussie, for anyone who hasn't read the article). Now I
don't go with that kind of middle-class conformity in poetry they seem
to represent either (I'm tired here so I'll be informal) but I think
that what really happens is that they speak for a kind of British
mild cultural nationalism that focuses on inherited tradition whereas
she argues for a form of experimentalism that is seemingly
international but underneath nationalistically US American. It's a
problem of two strong national cultures having to co-habit within the
same language. The nationalism of the Brits mainly takes a mildly
conservative and resistant form: the US is now by far the more
populous, economically powerful and expansive. The US is more overtly
religious than the UK, but its real religion +is+ America (meaning
USA equals the continent) and that religion is global in ambition and
deeply nationalistic in its capitalist drive. The domination of other
cultures is very expressly part of that (US politicians make no secret
of the role of Hollywood in that) What happened to some extent in
English language poetry was that the avant-garde movements were to
some extent linked to a need to find distinctively American forms of
literary speech, which is fine, but a problem if you're not American.
Even worse if you're not American nor middle-class but English because
the English poetic tradition is of course overwhelming based on class.
Irish poets, for example, can at least still define themselves against
being English and in a nationalistic way without being perceived as
resistant to innovative writing because the nationalistic agenda of
control is between the two most populous countries. England becomes
Britain in this area ( so Scots or Welsh writers who no longer define
themselves against Englishness, like Duffy, become 'Brits' that is
Anglophone extension of the English).
So it's a quarrel between siblings (US nationalism, British
nationalism) over possession of the family silver. For those of us who
are dispossessed tenants on the estate, it's no use neither.
On 16/04/2008, Jeffrey Side <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Here is an interview that I did with Marjorie Perloff for Poetry Salburg Review in 2006. I have been given permission by its editor, Wolfgang Görtschacher, to reproduce it here:
> http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Perloff%20interview%202.htm
>
--
David Bircumshaw
Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
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