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BRITISH-IRISH-POETS  1998

BRITISH-IRISH-POETS 1998

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Subject:

Re: modernism and Rimbaud

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Date:

Wed, 5 Aug 1998 02:49:15 EDT

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Modernism under attack.  Glad to see that Philip Larkin has joined our list.  

I wouldn't personally do without a drop of the writings of the persons
herementioned, and certainly not Gertrude Stein or even later Picasso.  All of
them could write, compose, or paint rings round us.  

As for leading us all into the wasteland.  Who said anyone had to follow?  How
can we have an appeal for variousness coupled with such a withering look at
the honoured past? 

It's just amazing how it gets to be the one woman modernist mentioned who the
male "can't read".  Every male modernist under discussion gets at least some
praise from Tony.   I mean, speak her words out loud, dig the repetitions and
their humour, or get a tape of her.  See how important she has been to women's
writing, oops, shouldn't have mentioned it.  Incidentally, why did Tony select
the Aunt Sally of Ruth Padell to attack after a list of praised male writers
at the end of the Andrew Duncan publication?  This is all inadvertent, I know,
but it is also . . . advertent. The statistics of mentions keep adding up,
inexorably, along with each male disclaimer.  Why does Peter find an excuse
for not mentioning women writers?  I don't know how he can say they have been
prioritised in this zone: that's a cliché which falls down when you look at
the evidence.  We shouldn't be fooled by the space taken up in bookshops by
"women's studies", an academic industry.

So does this make me obsessed with women writers or in favour of affirmative
action?   No.  I'm not in the least obsessed about it.  I'm at a party where
we need more guests -- as if half the world were missing. And when someone
highly suitable like Gertrude Stein begins to enter the room, she's politely
taken by the elbow and shown the door.   I just like the work of a lot of
women writers, and think that it's sometimes hard for males to see that what
they think is a matter of taste is actually a foreignness of consciousness.  

Please don't mistake anything I say for accusations of sexism, especially
neither Peter nor Tony: that's not what I'm saying.  I know, for example, that
Peter is highly appreciative of many women poets and if I don't say the same
for Tony that's only because I'm not in direct contact and should not presume.
I'm talking about the direction discussions take.

Ask me for a list, well, I have just posted a list on the Buffalo channel
mentioning quite a few along with a host of other male British poets' names,
50+ all told. I forgot quite a few too -- John James, Roy Fisher, Thomas A.
Clark, Robin, perhaps others on this list, many old Cambridge names, for
example -- but am very ready to be called to task for that on the Buffalo
channel.  I'm just trying to start a wider spread knowledge about British
poetry over there and feel it would be a good idea for us to take in an
answering knowledge over here -- a broad knowledge of current US writing, not
one based on our own personal contacts and therefore agendas.

If I can tag this on for Robin.  I suppose one would call "revisionist",
rather than empiricist, the present-day historians who claim that the setting
in of the proletariat in the full sense came later in France than one might
think. They tend to look at annals and statistics, if that's what you mean by
empircist, and then entities such as "class" or "proletariat" tend to get
fuzzy.  I was thinking of Robert Tombs very professional history of 19th
century France (don't have the exact title right at hand), who does assemble
evidence quite carefully.  (In another book, he greatly whittles down the
supposed number of Commune victims of the suppression, which is an example of
what I am calling revisionist method.)  

The question hangs on the definition of proletariat -- apparently, the bulk of
the "industrial" participants in the Commune struggles in Paris came from
small or smallish artisinat set ups (in Belleville, say) rather than from
fuller factory conditions.  I imagine a historian would call the 19th century
le Creusot strike -- in the Auvergne, I think -- more of a forerunner of 20th
century Marxist views of social development.

It no doubt makes little difference whether a historical complexity matches or
not a particular definition of a particular cult word.  (I distrust Marxist
and revisionist historians alike.)



Doug  




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