I am not, in fact, hostile to all the list of names hosted by Chris Emery.
Careful reading of my own message would show that I was not claiming anything
for the term avant-garde -- merely saying it was a wider concept than anyone
was seeing, to judge by messages on our list. (I get bored when people keep
trying to redefine terms or modishly use innovative or anything else, what's
the difference?).
But I am hostile to the unpleasant tone adopted by a few members of this
younger more populist generation -- some others of those poets I'm friendly
with. Chris Emery's contribution is certainly agist and the fact that it is
aggressively so, self-assertedly so doesn't help. His tone is wrong. Why
can't a poet see that? "X (poet still alive for godssake) belongs to history."
We're supposed to be experts about tone. Citation of Artaud (manic tone) and
Tzara (Dada had a job to do then) is no rescue: you don't gain in status
through citing influences. That's why this constant citation of Prynne is
wrong-toned, too. I am not too interested in either kind of Cambridge lineage
or in clubs. Chris is, I notice, implying a second club and I'm not so sure
he's including himself out of that one. I would hope truly to stand outside
both of them: the job to be done is bigger than that.
I would be very happy if there were an opening between these camps and
generations in all directions: much happier than Chris Emery's scorn seems
equipped to realise. Not least because there are probably more women active
on on the populist side -- for I see we're still not really getting to grips
with the sexism question.
My motive has nothing to do with my own reputation, which I'm perfectly happy
with. I just think it's about time we started thinking about the health of
British poetry. Like it or not, there is such an entity -- swashbuckling
attitudes won't sweep that question away either -- but in a very delicate
sense. There's a fashion for thinking you can just live the middle term of
the dialectic, "becoming". We should not make crude mistakes about the curious
dialectic between national and international that is now part of
globalisation, for it is crude to make a too simple appeal to
internationalism, say. At the level of national and international politics no
one would talk so simply because there the problems are real. But British
poetry both has and loses its borders constantly, and would ideally include
the whole multi-cultural possibility.
We're in such a mean stage of literature and the new Fleet Street circulation
nastiness has infected even the literary mags. I'd prefer to reach out a hand
to Chris Emery, not flame at him: I hope that wouldn't offend his sense of
authenticity.
Best
Doug Oliver
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