The Second Letter

Dear Walrus

I’m getting used to this new keyboard which seems also to dictate a new rhythm and style of thinking.

The days are still too disrupted to give any considered thought to your e-mail but here are a few thoughts in lieu …

1. Where I’m coming from … to be honest the January silence was a period of reconsideration: what was this Blog for? Why blog? Who was – might – be reading it ‘out there’. It coincided with – on the one hand – listening to Bernadette Mayer describing how she made a choice given her domestic life: to read or write? I turned this question on myself: to write (ie creative work or the daily blogging/critical work?). Quite simply I don’t have time for both. A sentence which leapt out at me in the Duncan piece was:

“Yes, I was running away from work, from the only real work to do.”

You speak of a thesis – implying a joint project – and I’m wondering what I’m doing veering back into critical discourse.

On the other hand, a nagging sense of footling around. I read Ron Silliman, other bloggers who seem to be launching 3,000 word entries a day. How could I presume to issue thoughts on any subject given my dispersed reading habits, erratic jumps of idea, periods of inactivity due to the day-to-day demands of teaching & other stuff? Would it be better to just shut up shop and confine my ideas to Moleskine notebooks?

2. “Writing poetry criticism during the late sixties was to associate oneself with an academic world, and a tone of voice, which was considered inimical to the life of poetry itself. It was more important to look out of the window, to feel the light coming in, or the way the whole world seemed to collapse around you and rearrange itself as you stepped off the curb, than to think about poetry in a way that might improve other people’s lives. There was the poetry of being alive and there was the poetry on the page. The word “poet” was often used generically to describe the way you lived your life, whether you wrote anything or not.”
Lewis Warsh, ‘Introduction’, The Angel Hair Anthology.

I like this.
I like the phrase “the way the whole world seemed to collapse around you and rearrange itself as you stepped off the curb” – its fusion of urban walking and limit-breaking.
I like “there was the poetry of being alive and there was the poetry on the page”. Surely this relates to what you’re trying to locate in terms of the US/UK divide? That poetry is not simply what ends up between the covers. Rather, it implies an entire politics of living. Thus, the community around Duncan and Spicer; the New York generations of poets; what – I assume – has been generated within Cambridge, or the London-Brighton-Wales nexus of the 60s? Those poets who lived what they wrote as against those who separated the life from the writing?

What pact did Raworth make? “intelligence/ shall not replace intuition”.

3. Standing by your words.

Why I began the Blog was an attempt to break out of a timidity brought on by years of academic/ teaching-related preciosity. Having conducted a correspondence with Lisa Jarnot I realized that ‘Poetry’ – in the broader sense – was a matter of ‘going public’. Again: risk, vulnerability, putting it ‘out there’. You’ll have seen my rather gauche playing around with who-is-Belgianwaffle-really in early posts which also owes something to my compromised position as a teacher in a school. There are things one can/cannot say. In turn, I pose the question why you – U.P., Walrus, whatever nom de plume you wish to assume – “prefer not” and elect for Bartlebian anonymity. That way leads to the Dead Letter Office – unless you can convince me otherwise?

(The Harry Lime theme plays, the cat crawls over the shiny shoes, a light falls upon the face, an eyebrow raised … )

I’m asking myself is this a tease or a professional hedge?

In other words - where are you coming from?

Yours sincerely

The Carpenter