Height: 1.08 inches
Weight: 5.0 pounds
Arrived this afternoon and has already made its first words.
I will put it to sleep soon.
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I've had a headache since midday. The impending Oral exams and attendant admin. fuzz the brain.
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Got two volumes of Rachael Blau Duplessis' Drafts project in the post plus Joni Mitchell's 'For the Roses'.
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Dear Walrus: thanks for the reply. You'll gather I'm not really in the best frame of mind to make any intelligent response this evening. However, there's plenty more to say. D'you know the 'Gnostic Contagion' volume about Duncan and the strange illnesses that spread amongst the students who heard him lecture? Something in the voice and/or the intensity of his ideas.
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Today, boys and girls, we’re going to look at ‘Song of the Chinchilla’ by Lisa Jarnot*. I liked the poem immediately – and I’ve given it to ...
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April Fool?
1 comment:
Worry not, old chap. No mad rush. Hope the headache dissipates. Surfing last nite I think I found a book that might be relevant to this discussion: Peter Barry’s Poetry Wars (Salt, 2006). Looking at the book on the web one paragraph leapt out and struck me as important, even enlightening.
“British poetry in the 1970s had been through a long post-war period in which there was a keenly felt sense of inferiority to the poetry of the United States. Poetry from the States, epitomised by the work of Ezra Pound and the early T. S. Eliot, had been the predominant poetic influence in the period of high modernism, and American poetry was indisputably the major body of contemporary poetry in English in the 1950s and 1960s. In the polemical introduction to his 1962 anthology The New Poetry, A. Alvarez famously accused British poets of turning away in genteel distaste from the full-frontal impact of the modern world, and he held up the model of the American ‘confessional’ poets – Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman – as poets who registered the trauma of modernity in their own addictions, obsessions, and breakdowns. The radical poets associated with the Poetry Society in London in the 1970s also looked across the Atlantic for models, but they regarded the ‘confessionals’ as the conservative ‘Establishment’, and instead felt strong affinities with the dissenting voices of American poetry (the poets assembled in Donald Allen’s definitive Grove Press anthology The New American Poetry, 1945—1960), such as the Black Mountain poets – Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn – the New York Poets – Frank O’Hara, Jack Spicer, James Schuyler – and the ‘Beats’ – Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Elsewhere in Britain, poets loosely linked to the Cambridge lecturer and poet J. H. Prynne were interested in a different branch of the American poetic ‘anti-establishment’, namely, the ‘Objectivists’ of an earlier generation – Lorine Niedecker, Carl Rakosi, Louis Zukofsky. By the 1970s, a major resurgence of British poetry was taking place among poets who looked to these various ‘dissenting’ American poets for inspiration and example when the British scene seemed moribund.”
Sadly, Barry’s thesis is that these radicals were ousted by the conservative mainstream. A massive irony of the book is that it is introduced by Andrew Motion and his preface oozes complacency.
Now, I'm off to look into Gnostic Contagion. Sayonara.
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