Roger
I liked Larkin's description of railway lines as seen from the end of
a station platform. I liked it because I worked on the railways for a
decade.
I not long ago too posted a poem here which I hope made clear my sense
of distance from the Larkinesque. But, for the record, I have no doubt
about Larkin's disdain for the working class, or his
anti-intellectualism.
But it doesn't mean I trust the alleged avant-garde either. Or,
particularly, Perloff's insistence that you can overlook the fascism
in writers like Pound.
At the moment though I'm struggling to come to terms with the fact
that last Friday we unwittingly provided played hosts to the local
Serbian Chetnik poetry appreciation society. And that the poet who
read was:
a) a self-described European poet writing in English.
b) published by Salt
c) an admirer of Pound who used traditional forms so predictable I
could see the following rhyme before the next line began. At various
points he described himself as English, at others as Jewish, he
repeatedly mentioned to the Serb visitors that he thought that the
Allies should have supported the Royalists in WWWII, that the Muslims
in Bosnia and Kossovo were ethnically Serb, that he hated current
English poetry.
d) a symbolist, a mythicist, who compared himself to Yeats
while
e) he treated us like servants, teaches at Cambridge, made nearly 600
quid for an hour and a bit reading
f) that the audience loved it all, apart it seemed from me and the
only other person present who actually was working-class. One of our
members said to me on the way out 'I bet your really enjoyed having an
avant-garde poet here tonight'. I just said 'Do you think so?' I was
otherwise speechless. He had my closest friend selling his books for
him on the break, I can't even talk to her about the horror the
evening inspired in me. We had a poet who proclaims a belief in peace,
and ethnic determination, who allies himself somehow with the
avant-garde while writing poetry so mechanically predictable it could
be done by software. He has won prizes a-plenty. Salt publish him.
Cambridge nurtures him. The Chetnik's friend. Who says he's Jew, and
proud to be English and to have met Ezra Pound in the 1960s.
Man, it did my head in. I haven't had a drink in seven months but I
almost went and got pissed afterwards. I felt +that+ close to it.
2008/5/12 Roger Day <[log in to unmask]>:
> A question for you, Dave. Where are you going with this? Pace your
> comments about knowing about those who or what our ancestors are
> about, and I agree with it, however your comments ascend at times into
> polemic and leaps of logic such as the final sentence. I wonder what
> lies behind this single-minded pursuit? What is it Nietsche said? If
> you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you? But
> then, as much as fashionable people today want to ignore it, someone
> has said that god is dead. Bury the idea, discredit the authors. It's
> there, just as Alan Moore laid the tombstone for Superman.
>
> I note your favorable comments about Larkin and the disconnect you
> made between his letters and his poetry. If anything, Larkin
> condescended and looked down that long, dour nose in his poetry,
> hating those post-war consumers. The hatred for fancy European
> theorists, the general distaste for the working-class shared by a lot
> of the working-class "who made good." A while, before I was ill, I
> used to catch myself burying my past, showing a Larkinesque disdain
> for the working class. I've changed for the better I hope. I wonder
> even now if some undergraduate is cementing Larkins' pornography with
> his poetics ah, he mysogyny of it all.
>
> The duchamp readymade has a long lineage in the art-world, it is much
> mocked by the right-wing press. However, as much as people (the Daily
> Mail, say) deride such Duchampean or Picabian japes, we have to deal
> with it; it is there, people, well, me included make these things.
> It's not going away, as much as you'd like it to. Engaging with it
> rather than denying it would seem to be a more fruitful option but to
> each their own.
>
> Roger
>
>
>
> On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 8:13 AM, David Bircumshaw
> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > Thanks for posting that link, Max.
> >
> > I think it worth observing that the piece reminds me that the roots of
> > English language modernism are in the culturally segregated
> > aestheticism of the 1890s - this is where the looking-down superiority
> > of Pound, Eliot and Stevens originates, and that the fetish of
> > 'experiment' divorced from content reinforces that.
> >
> > 2008/5/11 Max Richards <[log in to unmask]>:
> >
> >
> > > On 12/5/08 3:45 AM, "Douglas Barbour" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > >
> > >> And an intriguing wandering it is, Christopher. I don't pretend to
> > >> 'get' it all yet, or at least so far as to respond coherently, but I
> > >> think I tend to agree with you. I wonder about those of us who do find
> > >> ourselves working the fragment & the non-narrative (at least in some
> > >> ways) while also feeling that we do need to remember, or to do what
> > >> battle we can with 'historical amnesia' (wonderfully examined, in one
> > >> area, in a piece by Marilynne Robinson in the latest Harper's). I
> > >> admire the use of narrative as a means, but it's not my means...
> > >>
> > >> Doug
> > >
> > > Robinson's Harper's essay:
> > >
> > > http://www.ephblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/harpersmagazine-2008-05-00
> > > 82007.pdf
> > >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > 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
> >
>
>
>
> --
> My Stuff: http://www.badstep.net/
> "She went out with her paint box, paints the chapel blue
> She went out with her matches, torched the car-wash too"
> The Go-Betweens
>
--
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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