On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 7:35 AM, Tim Allen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hi Uche,
>
> I'm afraid you would have to look somewhere on the endless archive of the
> Brit-po list. I haven't yet posted much to Poetryetc - I'm a very occasional
> contributer. Some of the things I've said on this topic would also be in the
> Terrible Work archive, which I'm sorry to say is currently not available.
>
> But surely it is not too difficult to understand how that 60's opposition
> between free and formal came about. I lived it of course. Perhaps it is
> something that is more understandable to us Brits with our heavy hang-over
> of class consciousness. I know that it was different in other countries.
> (The U.S. experience was more similar to ours but the scale and the
> direction was different.)
>
Yeah, I expect it might be obvious having lived through it, but I really am
at a loss. Of course I've heard of a lot of stories of political ferment in
the 60s, but it's still very hard for me to conceptualize how it might have
translated so directly to prosody/anti-prosody. Having been born well after
the 60s that period is legend to me, and I guess I'm learning that some of
the reality was even more demented than the legend.
Where I first got very heavily involved in poetry, in Nigeria, the dominant
dispute (even then becoming dated) was over Négritude, and how to reconcile
colonial with traditional "modes of thought", which was in those cases as
much a nonce term as ever.
> Where are you based?
>
Right now I'm in Boulder, Colorado, where apparently the Beat poets laid
down their bequests. It is certainly a hippie town, and that is part of its
charm, and from what I've been able to stomach of the local poetry culture,
I wonder about the correlation between the overall town culture, and the
slovenly self-indulgence I suffer through at so many poetry readings, but
I'm not inclined to push any such correlation very far, as you can tell.
--
Uche Ogbuji http://uche.ogbuji.net
Founding Partner, Zepheira http://zepheira.com
Linked-in profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ucheogbuji
Articles: http://uche.ogbuji.net/tech/publications/
TNB: http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/author/uogbuji/
Friendfeed: http://friendfeed.com/uche
Twitter: http://twitter.com/uogbuji
http://www.google.com/profiles/uche.ogbuji
|