Hi, Jamie -


One last pull before I go home.

Ok - let's go for 'mixing in' rather than 'mixing up'.

I guess 'confessional' was an easy label to reach for ... 

I think I was distinguishing (in my last) between Plath, Berryman, Lowell - and a poetry of extreme personal experience which I encountered in the sixth form - and the Yeats, Eliot, Stevens (and some version[s] of modernism) that I encountered as an undergraduate. I am afraid it's all 1960s. Everything changed for me in the 1970s. I have to admit that this second group does not do much to support my claim of 'personal experience presented through the first person' - apart from some of Yeats. Plath, Lowell, Berryman seem closer, but none fit with the stereotype 'personal anecdote' poem I have in mind. (I don't think it was Rita Dove ...it was a poem about a motor accident involving a deer, I think). Perhaps there is some screen memory operating here ...

Time to go home.

Bon voyage,


Robert

-----Original Message-----
From: British & Irish poets [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jamie McKendrick
Sent: 28 November 2014 18:59
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: the avant garde vs. the lyrical:the telephone book

Hi Robert,
   No, of course we all have our own preferences and they don't need to be preclusive. By orthodoxy I'm indicating the overlap between the Duncan and Mellors quotes I gave, and the Brady and Patterson quotes, and a great deal more that could easily be referenced, as well as this more originating one by Olson.
  I don't think I was mixing up personal anecdotalism with biographical criticism so much as mixing it in, but also signalling that a great deal of personal incident, say, in Yeats's life surfaces unashamedly in his poems. 
Turning a young woman he knew into gazelle, or was that a gazebo - not my joke, is certainly transformation but for all he said about the poet not being the figure who sits down at the breakfast table he doesn't appear to have been inclined to spurn the incidents in his life, such as an anecdote about a school visit, as being unfit for poetry.  I'm not so happy about Plath and Berryman, or even Lowell for that matter, being tagged as "confessional" but the label's been stuck on with superglue.
  I've prematurely aged in the last few years - I blame this list - so I'm catching up fast. But still, the teaching you had of Eliot, Yeats and Stevens doesn't quite seem to bear out your earlier point about "...a practice of writing other than that which was dominant in the teaching of poetry in the 1960s - of the personal anecdote or personal experience presented through the first person"?
   Finally, about "the strain of commercially published poetry that works that way" - I can certainly recognize the phenomenon, as with collections based on the death of a loved one or illness. Their general success I'd put down to the media needing a handle to pick poetry up with, rather than the usual bargepole, but also, understandably, human interest on the part of readers. These things I'd be much happier to deal with on a case by case basis (some in my view having real merit, others not) than according to some generic recoil from personal experience.
   Maybe the Perloff article you're thinking of was her review of Rita Dove's anthology. Her argument against one particular poem she singled out as merely personal was, it seemed to me, fair enough.
Sorry I haven't time now for a more thought-out response. And thanks for the bon voyage, Jamie



-----Original Message-----
From: Hampson, R
Sent: Friday, November 28, 2014 5:48 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: the avant garde vs. the lyrical:the telephone book

Hi, Jamie -

I decided to decide that any attack was on Olson.

I included the quotation with the idea that it was available to creative misinterpretation; I hadn't considered that it could have become an orthodoxy, although my citation hadn't excluded this possibility. The sentence encouraged my own practice in the 1970s, because it chimed with my preference for indirection, and my interest then in exploring expression through factual details and citation. However, this practice co-existed with a fascination with Donne and Herbert, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Ginsberg and 
Levertov  ...   Does a poetics that enables my own practice have to preclude 
appreciation of other ways of working?

* I have just checked: I am 7 years older. My mid-60s sixth-form teacher was a Leavisite, so the idea of biography and anything other than the words on the page was discouraged. At the same time, we were also linked in to Critical Quarterly, which I remember as publishing Plath and Berryman; MacNiece and Lowell and Gunn were also part of the school-poetry contemporary mix. Not so much 'personal anecdote', then, as heavy doses of US confessionalism. (I think you are mixing biographical criticism with personal anecdote in this paragraph.)

(As undergraduates at King's, we were given a poem by Charles Olson to read in a first-year poetry seminar by the Head of Department, Geoffrey Bullough - which still seems to me an unusual poem for him to have selected. 
Otherwise, I don't remember much 20th-century poetry being taught beyond Yeats and Eliot and Wallace Stevens.)

* I agree that poetry of personal anecdote' is the regularly repeated charge - and it is worth being called on it.  There is a strain of commercially published poetry which works that way - would you accept that? 
There is also a tendency - as in The X Factor - to foreground an 'exceptional' experience: the death of a child, the death of one's partner, writing about one's midlands family. This has struck me as a distinct difference between poetry readings by the former group as against the kind of poetry readings I more usually attend - that is, in terms of how the poet or the person doing the introductions frames the work. Ann Carson's Nox, however, with its prompt from the death of her brother, I find very interesting in its approach to this personal material. As you say, it is not a matter of the use of personal experience, but rather how this is handled and transformed.

I don't think the suggestion is that its use is unmediated or unconsidered, but rather (I am half-recalling here an essay by Marjorie Perloff that I don't have to hand) that there is a too easy formula of personal anecdote followed by moral conclusion.

I haven't checked the current Poetry Review, but this sounds like pertinent evidence.

I hope you enjoy your trip to India,


Best wishes


Robert

-----Original Message-----
From: British & Irish poets [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jamie McKendrick
Sent: 28 November 2014 16:28
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: the avant garde vs. the lyrical:the telephone book

Hi Robert,
  Following Peter's response to your Olson quote:
'Objectism is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego ... that peculiar presumption by which western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature ... and those other creations of nature which we may, with no derogation call objects'.
my own may well have seemed like an attack on you, or indeed on Olson.
Neither was really intended. What I felt reading it was an impatience that this position, from however remarkable a poet, had become a kind of orthodoxy, and could be used to annul a vast tradition that is by no means only that of "western man", and even within a western history has so many rich and curious variations.
   Two things, I'm afraid in haste, that strike me. First is that, though I'm guessing we're near contemporaries my experience of  this dominant experience of teaching - in the 60s or do you mean the 70s? - was very different, which of course doesn't discount your own. Olson was taught in the American dept. of the University where I studied and in the English dept. the idea that there was any stress on personal anecdote seems utterly unrecognisable. Sure we were expected to know something about Maud Gonne in reading Yeats but that went with all kinds of provisos about the biographical fallacy. Prevailing Eliotic or even Leavisite strictures would have been as inhospitable to the idea as any contemporary avant-gardist.
Even the old New Criticism might not want to be tarred with this particular brush. I'd be surprised if things were that different now, though you'll know a lot more of that.
  The second thing is in two parts. One, and this is somewhat also in reply to Tim's last post, I get very fed up with the idea that the 'personal anecdote' is the determining feature of mainstream poetry. It just seems to me blatantly untrue. Out of curiosity I looked at the latest issue of Poetry Review, often seen as the bastion of mainstream conservatism. Apart from the main prose articles being on Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill's Collected Poems, both of a high quality, and a fine article on Ashbery's French translations by David Wheatley, the poems just don't fit this description.
Well, one or two could be made to conform - but the one most obviously related to family experience, by US poet Jodie Hollander called 'Splitting and Fucking', seems very effectively to blow up the genre. Carrie Etter, as it happens, has a poem with a strong family connection which is in no way fettered by that. Some of the more interesting poems eschew the personal altogether. This evidence, as they say, is merely 'anecdotal', but it leads me to a second response: that I don't anyway have any desire to see personal experience outlawed from poems. I welcome it if it can be made significant or transformed. I see a lot hangs on if and how such things are transformed, but it's merely patronising to assume that poets that use personal experience will do so in an unmediated and unconsidered way.
   Anecdote is just a dismissive word for story, and stories have always, however refracted or minimal, been part of a lyric tradition, as well as of the longer poem, and not just to retrograde or conservative versions of those.
   I remember being struck by a question Peter Riley asked long ago and in a different context - "when did we get to be so haughty?". I hope he won't object to this being used here, quite possibly in defence of certain poetic practices he has no interest in, but this disdain for personal experience seems to me to warrant it.

I'm in India for the next week so may not be able to pick up any replies. I hasten to add my trip nothing to do with the British Council. (Incidentally, that part of the Patterson quote is way out-of-date as, far as I'm aware, it's been years since they funded any poetry jaunts...so at least in this respect we can all happily skulk in the same sinking boat.) Jamie


-----Original Message-----
From: Hampson, R
Sent: Friday, November 28, 2014 12:07 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: the avant garde vs. the lyrical:the telephone book

I was interested in Olson's statement as the prompt for a practice of writing other than that which was dominant in the teaching of poetry in the 1960s - of the personal anecdote or personal experience presented through the first person.


Robert


PR