Good to hear of this Schwitters Selected. I'd wondered if such a thing
existed.
J
-----Original Message-----
From: Pierre Joris
Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2018 2:14 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Rebecca Watts
Very well said, Tony. We have indeed been there before — are there all the
time, & it’s a waste of time to bemoan the sadly trite & tritely sad facts.
Though I certainly would like bookshops to have those different sections for
poetry too — at least those that still have an actual poetry section…
Pierre
p.s. on something completely different: a while back someone brought up
Schwitters on this list, can’t remember the exact context, but I was
thinking then: Kurtchen is an excellent example of a serious avant-garde
poet/artist who also happened to be for awhile at least a very popular poet
("Anna Blume” was the equivalent of a pop hit in Germany). After his death,
except for the Ursonate as classic of soon/performance poetry, the writing
was forgotten / hidden because the moola is in wall-art: his collages &
visual works were picked up by museums worldwide & now it was KS the artist.
How many people know that in 1974 Dumont Verlag brought out his Collected
Writings: 4 big 3 to 400 page volumes gathering all the poetry, proses &
plays. A massive opus. In 1993 Jerome Rothenberg & I brought out a Selected
Writings under the title pppppp (Temple U Press, reprinted by exact change &
still in print). The pleasure and sheer delight of discovering the width of
KS’s literary work & of translating it is still with me.
> On Feb 1, 2018, at 8:21 AM, Tony Frazer <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> The poetry world is bedevilled by the fact that it’s all described as
> “poetry”. No-one in the fiction world mistakes Dan Brown for James Joyce,
> and thus they’re in different sections of Waterstone’s and Amazon. Alas,
> we’re now in the situation that Rupi Kaur is on the shelf next to PJ
> Kavanagh, Hollie McNish next to Paul Muldoon, with no apparent
> differentiation. I have no issue at all with Ms Kaur selling her trite
> verses by the bucketload, as it would appear that many young readers want
> it, or think they do, and I doubt the sales are being stolen away from
> “serious poets". That’s all fine. One should also not mistake it for a
> broadening of the poetry audience. It ain’t. Where I do have an issue is
> the conflation of what she’s doing (and Hollie McNish for that matter)
> with “poetry”. We need a better term. Andrew Duncan refers to certain
> kinds of writing as “art-poetry” but that term won’t hold water in the big
> bad world out there. On the other hand, I’m old enough to recall the
> appalling million-selling volumes by Rod McKuen. And there’s Pam Ayres.
> Patience Strong. Etc etc. Have we not been here before?
>
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