Re:

> From: Peter Riley <[log in to unmask]>
> But perhaps all those Irish poets would  have been just as happy in an
> anthology called the opposite of Other

>I find this offensive, tantamount to saying that Trevor Joyce's careful
>argument was informed by nothing save a blind urge to be published,
>anytime, anywhere, i.e. in Other or its opposite.


I really don't see how you got that out of what I said, and I hope to God
Trevor Joyce didn't. It was a rather compressed sentence, I suppose, in
midst of a rhetorical flow.  Trevor spoke not only of himself, indeed only
occasionally and modestly mentioning his own practice, but of a number of
Irish poets who deserved to be represented in the Others anthology; which
was true and fine, I've read all of them and he's right. Ric replied that
it's not a representative anthology (in spite of its name) which is also
fine.  All I meant was perhaps they would all (included and not-included)
have been as happy or happier to be included in an anthology which didn't
define them as "others" but just as poets worth reading, alongside Carson,
Hartnett and all those other (Irish) poets worth reading.

I understand perfectly the resentment about promotion and de-promotion, the
same thing has gone on in this country for decades and still is and I wrote
to BP about it quite recently. I find it quite significant that the
power-centre seems to be Belfast more than Dublin and I think that's quite
likely to change now.  But the argument presumes two things:  (a) All those
poets, from Denis Devlin to Catherine Walsh, have something in common which
separates them from the promoted Irish poets: otherness, advancedness, or
whatever you call it.  (b) All their work is of high quality and has only
been neglected because of opposition from people in influential positions
like Edna Longley.

It's actually very difficult to see (a) -- there seems to me to be a great
variety of ways of writing poems among them and a lot that I've read by
Trevor, G Squires, Michael Smith, feels quite centrally placed (very
professionally and effectively so) as distinct from the avant-gardisms of
Catherine Walsh, and I think Maurice Scully writes a kind of poetry all his
own. Isn't there a danger that defining them all in a seperatist continuity
risks reinforcing the neglect and playing right into Ms Longley's hands?
(b) is unlikely to be entirely true in that some of these poets operate a
highly fragmented or distorted mode which will have difficulty finding its
readers except in the academies, whatever Edna Longley or the Bishop of All
Ireland says about it. Indeed there's nothing like an attack from the
Poetry Society curates to raise a young poet's profile in this country. And
if there are only two kinds of Irish poets, A and B or them and us, how do
you read someone like Patrick Kavanagh?


/PR




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