Intemperate comment by Jane Holland:
"As an editor, I am open to most things, including this ... type of work.
As an editor, I have to be open to it, otherwise I wouldn't be doing my
job properly. But as a poet myself, and as a reader/listener, I have no
problems in saying that I dislike it intensely.
It makes me suspect utter charlatanism, because it provides no stable
ground from which to form a measured opinion. Listening to it and
trying to 1. make sense of it and 2. work out whether it's worth my time
is like trying to get a spirit level to balance on the wing of a tilting
airplane at high altitude. If I was going out for an evening of idle
entertainment, and this only lasted 3 minutes, I might find it amusing
and exhilarating. But to be asked to look on it as 'serious art' and on
Keston himself as some kind of Messiah of Poetry makes everything
inside me rebel.
Re Fiona's remark, I can't particularly criticise her decision to exclude
that kind of work. I'm reviewing the PR book for Stride, so I won't say
much here, but it is a book aimed at the mainstream reader, just as
Poetry Review, frankly, is aimed at the mainstream reader. (Except for
brief periods of its history, when the red flag was flying above Poetry
HQ!!!) If Angel Exhaust put out, as an example - and maybe it has, I
can't recall now - an anthology of its best bits, you can be pretty sure
you wouldn't find the likes of Seamus Heaney in there."
http://z11.invisionfree.com/Poets_On_Fire/index.php?
showtopic=1701&st=0&
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