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Sorry for delay in replying to this Dave - been out trying to get some sun while it's there. Realise too that Luke and Jaime have moved the thing on. But yes, very knotty, from every angle. Lawrence's 'authenticity' became just another way of critics saying that he was dealing with real life stuff while others were intellectualising and dealing mainly with ideas. For me it was always a false polarisation.

The Peter Reading thing though is something else and takes us right to the centre of one of the problems with mainstream poetry and it's notion of the 'authentic', as opposed to the purely intellectual or unreal - our typical mainstream poem is the individual response/reflection to a (supposedly) real emotional subject/content - so what happens when it isn't, when it is a fiction (no different to the 'fiction' of the novel etc.) yet is a fiction retaining the outer form of a real poem of the same sort?  I first came upon this phenomenon years ago when editing Terrible Work and trying to write reviews of mainstream stuff, trying to unpack this 'authenticity' rubbish they kept talking about by challenging what was actually going on in these fictitious poems, of which there were numerous examples. It was from this that I formed the idea that their poetry had at base nothing to do with authenticity whatsoever but was in fact an aesthetic model that simply used an artificial construct of the so-called realism of the individual voice as its template - which is why I always said it was at heart a poetry of bad faith.

I never ever wrote any response to Birthday Letters but I do remember talking about it and saying it was essentially a false poetry because while exhibiting the form and spirit of a genuine response it was in fact already based on both pre-known material in the public mind and his personal and private experience of the same. In addition its subject was enough to give it the sheen of recognition so half of his job as a poet was already done for him. 

Cheers

Tim
     
On 12 May 2018, at 09:02, David Bircumshaw wrote:

This interesting Tim, and knotty, but it has the feel of real discussion. One might almost say authentic :)

DH Lawrence could well be called authentic. Yet he was also rhetorical and pretentious, all those dark gods that had no place wandering the streets of an imagination made a bus ride from Nottingham. 

Is Peter Reading's 'C' authentic? A hundred pieces of prose behaving like poems each a hundred words long written in a style au naturel but as artificial and calculated as a wedding song by Spenser. A fake fiction about cancer by a man who once had it and another time would die from it. Tom Paulin, an otherwise fan, regarded it as 'adolescent'.

Are the best-selling Birthday Letters authentic?? Is Maya Angelou ditto?

Best

Dave