Tim,
You mention Tony Trehy's article as "a wonderful contextualization of
that mainstream's power and centrality and nature and behaviour".
That and the subsequent post from Trehy's blog struck me in a very
different light - as being full of a specifically ad feminam hostility. He
complains bitterly of an exhibition curated by Carol Anne Duffy which he
hasn't seen, and then attacks a book by Jackie Kay which he hasn't read. We
are told by proxy that "she can't write" (though we are are not even
informed which book of hers, whether prose or poetry, has provoked this
judgement) and this is meant to be enough for us to dismiss one of the few
black women poets published in Britain.
His account of the poetry of Alice Oswald does at least offer a quotation
but it's clear that he hasn't read this book either - he says he can't be
bothered to look up the (woman) illustrator. His negative description of
Oswald's work as "nature poetry" is about as helpful as David's
charaterization of Duffy's poetry as "social realism lite" which seems to
have found hearty approval on the list.
I'm certainly not suggesting you share these attitudes, but Trehy's posts
do make gender an issue. It may not even have crossed his mind that the
three poets he chose to vilify were all successful women writers, having
merely seen them as representative of the hated mainstream he can't be
bothered to read.
You don't have to be an Australian, or outside the small world of
British poetry conflicts, to find these binaries stultifying.
Jamie
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tim Allen" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, September 02, 2010 12:45 PM
Subject: Re: "The Conspiracy Against Poems" by Adam Fieled at The Argotist
Online
> Another quick thought in answer to Alison's 'goblin' thing.
>
> Did you read that link to Tony Trehy's article about Duffy at the
> Liverpool Tate? Now, you may agree with Tony or you may not, in his
> opinion about Duffy etc, that doesn't matter - what matters is the
> evidence of an absolutely huge gulf that exists between one thing and
> another. Now you can call these things whatever you like, but the most
> commonly used name for one of them is the 'mainstream', and Tony's
> article was a wonderful contextualization of that mainstream's power and
> centrality and nature and behavior etc. This is not all in his
> imagination. This is not a 'goblin', it's an everyday reality, something
> screwed tightly into the body of UK poetry.
>
> People have their own varied reasons for engaging with that fact,
> ignoring it or denying it etc - it depends on where you are and what you
> are doing, obvious. But of course this list has people on it who are not
> British poets, who operate in a different climate, where these problems
> have their own nuance, a nuance which often makes them underestimate the
> sharpness of the divide in little Britain.
>
> Tim A.
>
> On 2 Sep 2010, at 00:02, Alison Croggon wrote:
>
>> Looking at this argument, with its anger at goblins like the
>> mainstream
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