This piece, in last Saturday's Guardian might be of interest, particularly to those who knew Michael Donaghy.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/s...873332,00.html

Thank you for that article, Oliver.

I don't know why, but every other link on GT lately has had a goad in it for my pet "black beast" - the pomo academy.

O.k., so I might be obsessed with this issue, but I am comforted to know that I am in good company:

As the article goes on to say, "Literary taste vanished, or was banished, from the curriculum when he was a student."

But of course it makes a difference what is being taught in our universities, and Donaghy knew that.

So the next time someone berates me for my obsessive rants on this subject, realise you are also berating the ghost of Michael Donaghy.

And why is there this "lack of genuine academic engagement with emergent and contemporary verse"?

Because most of our English departments have been taken over by Marxist (or closely related) theorists who want to destroy or at least enervate the system (the "patriarchy") and all the cultural works which support it. This includes "traditional" or "mainstream" modes of poetry, which it sees as merely tools of cultural hegemony.

"Mainstream" to the present academy means "derivitive (and thus supportive) of the patriarchy."

So if a poem scans and is accessible to everday readers, it is obviously reactionary, and needs to be ignored.

The saying goes, that it is an ill wind that blows no good. And while I would prefer that we didn't have the rising gale of world troubles building daily, I think the time is coming when the citizens of the West will start to question why so many of the English departments in our universities are in apparent league with those who also want our culture expunged.



[This message has been edited by Mark Allinson (edited September 19, 2006).]

Further to the post above (and still on-topic concerning the reasons "Why Mainstream shouldn't be a dirty word in Poetry"), I wanted to post this excerpt from a review of a very funny satire on the pomo academy.

Quincy recommended this novel to me (The Lecturer's Tale , by David Hynes) and I am enjoying it immensely. Thanks, Quincy!

I post this to give some idea (allowing for the exaggerations of the genre) of the type of lunacy abroad of late in many Western universities:







[This message has been edited by Mark Allinson (edited September 18, 2006).]

Mark,

Glad you're enjoying the Hynes book.

I do wonder sometimes, though, if scansion "reads" for the uninitiated these days. I seem to recall Anthony Hecht complaining several decades ago that the doubly dactyls he solicited from the general public were almost always six syllables long but frequently not dactylic.

For that matter, I, like others here, no doubt, have gotten unrhymed metrical verse into not very formal-friendly journals--and I have to assume the pieces in question were taken for free verse.

That said, you don't have to know what 4/4 time is to tap your feet.

Quincy

Quincy, and I think that would be Michael Donaghy's point.

Paul Farley's piece was lovely, and I could tell it was written in sadness. It reminded me of the huge outpourings of sadness two years ago, in the papers. Saturday, the day it was published, was the second anniversary of Michael's death. The piece read almost as if written by Michael himself - it was essentially a precis of M's opinions on the subject, as a warm-up for the conference which is happening this coming weekend, which was introduced last year by Don Paterson and John Stammers in Michael's memory, at the launch of his posthumous collection Safest.

I would, given the vein this thread is developing in, like to take this opportunity to point out that while Michael had strong ideas about - and a deep commitment to - music, and the musicality of language, and the means of expressing that - ie prosody - and he had a love of metre which corresponded to his love of traditional dance steps which are the physical expression of the music - he also deeply admired many free verse poets, and wrote free verse himself. He wrote good, musical, solid free verse which is as firmly based in the ear as any metrical poetry. And he used loose metre, slant rhyme, versions, prose poems, nonce forms, tinkered-with forms. PLAY. Jokes.

What Michael loved was meaning, and its physical expressions. It would be sad to think that his name might be used to support narrow, prescriptive ideas about what 'is' and 'isn't' 'poetry' (& he loved scare quotes). As for postmodernism, insofar as it is a grey, flat, relativist plain, it was anathema to Donaghy - and as he responded to poetry physically, postmodernism seems to have given him physical pain. I certainly saw him wince & hunch over many times, discussing it. And I was a little alarmed by the strength of his feelings in those (as they now were) final months - it was as if no good could come of it.

However, like a politician, I think Michael also had a healthy regard and respect for some of the opposition, as more worthy opponents than others. You an always respect spmoepone's integrity of purpose, even if you disagree with their mesthods: he himself always insisted on any workshopped poem being read on its own terms. So let's read postmodernist poetry, if we must read it, on its own terms. And, without lapsing into bitterness and sectarian violence, let us then turn to our own work and try to live up to our own terms. But let us not make them too narrow and prescriptive, or then it will be just the flip side of the postmodern experiment.

I'm taking this opportunity to supplement Paul Farley's article with this one ("The Interior of a Heron's Egg"), which Josh Mehigan published over a year ago in the New Criterion : http://www.joshuamehigan.net/prose.html

KEB


PS - a caveat, just to say that when he was alive I would NEVER have had the temerity to say what Michael thought about this and that and what his ideas were! Of course much of it is there in the books, but his talk was so mercurial and so impossibly well-informed, it was hard often to keep up with the detail of his arguments. I could never hope to recreate his immense erudition.

Oliver and Katy, thanks for reminding me of this extraordinary poet.

Katy, the article is only open to subscribers.

Janet

Hi Quincy (I hope Ireland is treating you well).

I have never believed that only those readers who have been inducted into the black art of prosody know how to read a metrical poem. A well-written metrical poem reveals its own rhythm in the reading, and doesn't depend on an intimate knowledge of iambs and trochees.

In fact, I would often prefer readers with no prosody than those who know a great deal. So I don't believe that metrical poetry will die without scansion being taught.

I would guess that the metrical troubles Hecht experienced from the general public were down to writing skills, rather than reading capacity.

Yes, mainstream shouldn't be a dirty word when applied as a qualifier to "poetry," but neither should a statement like, "Literary taste vanished, or was banished, from the curriculum when he was a student" be accepted at face value either. Whose literary taste?

Farley writes:

In the time I've been paying serious attention - the past 15 or so years - there's been a steadily increasing anxiety over the marketing of poetry. I have to say, if marketing only meant promoting something already extant and rendering it more visible, then we'd be worrying over nothing. Poets, reasonably, would like to be read. Has anybody actually altered or skewed the way they write in order to conform to somebody's marketing mix? God help them. But one area of activity that has, I think, been actively damaged by marketing is the serious criticism of poetry. So much recent engagement has been focused on awards and prizes, on a perceived sense of hype over here and concurrent neglect over there, that any insightful consideration of form and shape and the constructed-ness of poems seems to have fallen by the wayside.

Some interesting observations there, but they are marred, for me, by this barely unspoken assumption that 'mid-century American formalism' and its antecedents are the only poetry worth caring about. "New formalism" (call it whatever name you like) has been aggressively marketing itself for more than a generation now, with the same predictable arguments, yet has never regained the standing of 'mid-century American formalism' in said marketplace. Perhaps a new approach might prove more uhm marketable.

Tom, as the quotation says, literary taste was indeed banished from the curriculum in most Western universities by the advent of post-modernism. The doctrine of the non-hierarchical relativity of all texts effectively means the end of taste, since no claim can be made that any one text is "better" than another. Pomo theory has no place for aesthetics, and the principle of hierarchy implies a "master/slave" situation which was politically unacceptable. Aesthetic taste still survives, of course, outside the academy, but no longer within it. With the element of aesthetics removed, the old "canonical" texts (which only support the colonialising patriarchy), could be replaced with a new canon of the "suppressed" or "marginalised" voices in literature. This is pure politics, or social studies at best, but has absolutely nothing to do with the appreciation of literary art.

I have absolutely no problem with the teaching of any of this politically-orientated stuff anywhere - so long as it is called by its correct name - either cultural studies, or gender studies, or racial studies.

My sole objection is that this is NOT literary studies, which has almost vanished, in Oz at least.

The best lampoon I have read on this pomo idea of the democratic, qualitative equality of all texts is this excerpt from Tom Stoppard's play, The Real Thing.


HENRY: Shut up and listen. This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It's for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you've done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly… [He clucks his tongue to make the noise.] What we're trying to do is to write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might … travel … [He clucks his tongue again and picks up the script.] Now, what we've got here is a lump of wood of roughly the same shape trying to be a cricket bat, and if you hit a ball with it, the ball will travel about ten feet and you will drop the bat and dance about shouting “Ouch!” with your hands stuck into your armpits. This isn't better because someone says it's better, or because there's a conspiracy by the MCC to keep cudgels out of Lords. It's better because it's better. You don't believe me, so I suggest you go out to bat with this and see how you get on.

- From The Real Thing, by Tom Stoppard.


For the pomo academy there are only cudgels, and only a fascist says this one is “better” than that one.

I like that quote Mark; well chosen.

Re. cudgels and bats, I don't know anything about the pomo academy but there seem to be plenty of self-appointed pomo poets/academics out there who are more than ready to pronounce on the unworthiness of various poems/poets and 'poetics'. Far from insisting that all poems are cudgels, they are highly particular about which poems fit that category.

Ron Silliman is an example. His VERY popular site can be interesting (I''ve sent off for a couple of books he's recommended), and he seems extremely well-informed on 20th/21st Century American poetry. But his blind spots and narrow-mindedness can be astonishing. Yeats is dismissed as of 'no use', Auden's imagery is 'bland' (!!!!) and, as I understand it, any poet guilty of unbridled lyricism (probably ALL of 'mainstream') is lumped into his ridiculous 'School of Quietitude': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Silliman

[This message has been edited by Mark Granier (edited September 20, 2006).]

Thanks, Mark.

Well, from a quick glance at Silliman's ideas, it looks like a clear case of nominal determinism.

http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/smile.gif

For me, there are only two types of poem - to varying degrees - cricket bats and cudgels.

Every reader knows when they hit that incoming ball with a beautifully made and balanced bat, and hear the sweet pop as it clears the boundary for a six.

And everyone knows the bone-jarring whack when the ball hits a cudgel and your hands vibrate with pain.

Everyone except the pomo-people, it seems.

How awful it must be for them to have no idea about the difference between bats and cudgels.

I almost feel sorry for them.

Almost.

[This message has been edited by Mark Allinson (edited September 20, 2006).]

On the other hand, I've seen and/or read any number of formalists who trash almost every free verse poem (exceptions seem to be made for friends and/or professional colleagues). Prejudice isn't a one-way street.

It's very difficult for me to take these discussions seriously, since "pomo" is always held up as this monolith seeking to destroy everything "traditional." Some of what is universally lumped under the disbaraging umbrella term "pomo" is useful (particularly--at least for me--in explicating power relationships within a particular group or society as revealed through their language and literature) and some of it is not useful or silly.

Really, how useful are these kind of absurd reductions and blanket dismissals? What have they led to? All I see are armed camps, each one tenaciously defending its "turf."

Yawn. No wonder I stopped reading theory--pomo, mo, and premo--a couple of years ago. Life's short, you know?

[This message has been edited by nyctom (edited September 20, 2006).]

For me, there are only two types of poem ...
I'm reminded of 2 pomo vs mainstream quotes

• "As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of poets: those who want to tell stories and sing songs, and those who want to work out the chemical equation for language and pass on their experiments as poetry" - "Short and Sweet", Simon Armitage
• "We read according to an undeclared handicap system, to the specific needs of the author. We meet the novelists a little way, the poets at least halfway, the translated poets three-quarters of the way; the Postmoderns we pick up at the station in their wheelchairs.", Don Paterson, "The Book of Shadows"

Of COURSE it isn't! I never thought that for a second. I like to believe I am open to all kinds of poetry, provided these is some element of of music, startling imagery or 'language so powerful it elbows language sideways', to quote Heaney on Hughes (hopefully more or less correctly). I have read little PoMo and LangPo stuff because everything I've read so far seems utterly flat and hopelessly hermeneutic. But I am open to suggestions.

BTW, Silliman's working on some interminable poem called 'Universe' reminds me of that character from Borges's story, The Aleph, who, drunk on his visions, is writing a poem about everything in the world. I wonder if Silliman got his idea from that story.

[This message has been edited by Mark Granier (edited September 20, 2006).]

Mark Granier: I like to believe I am open to all kinds of poetry ...
Sounds good

... provided these is some element of of music, startling imagery or 'language so powerful it elbows language sideways'
Which rather narrows the field. Even people like Holub might struggle to satisfy these criteria. I think I posted bits of
Leaving the poetry mainstream to Erato before - it suggests some sticks and carrots for those who'd like to wander. What I'd find useful are names of poets whose paths one could follow from the mainstream to pastures new. Eliot? Rich?!

Ah, it depends what one means by 'music', doesn't it?

As my Princeton Poetry and Poetics points out, 'music and poetry undoubtedly arose in common historical sources of primitive prayer, working chants etc...' Verlaine's manifesto (which I've never read by the way) apparently urges a 'commitment to the priority of sound over sense, and is 'enjoining a more general rejection of knowledge for the sake of feeling'.

I would go some of the way with that, though I think that sense or meaning has a kind of music too, which may be what Stevens meant when he wrote 'There is no wing like meaning.' You mention Holub, one of my favourites, and his poetry may be an example of this. 'The Door', for example, with its wonderful refrain, 'Go and open the door', seems to me to have certain musical elements.

I think in much modern (as opposed to PoMo) poetry, the sound of the words, and how they work together rhythmically (if not metrically) can be intensely musical. Eliot would be a perfect example, as would Pound. More recently, Fenton and Geoffrey Hill.

I know that this may sound a bit woffly; I'm arguing on instinct more than anything. But I write what we may as well call lyrical poetry, and this is largely what I prefer to read. POMo (or what Silliman calls Post Avant) poetry seems to me to recoil from music. But not only music. It doesn't care much for imagery either. It seems to distrust its own utterances. Ah, maybe I don't know what I'm talking about. But I do think that the roots of poetry ARE music, whether we like it or not. And if the roots are still putting out little green feelers, why shouldn't we like them, in all their many forms?

As to poets outside the mainstream, well, one person's wayward brook is another's Thames Estuary. But I'd imagine that many consider Rich to be mainstream at this point. Eliot is thoroughly mainstream and, as I maintain, musical to boot. Louise Gluck? Her 'Salmon' is, I think, wonderful, but I haven't kept up with her lately.



[This message has been edited by Mark Granier (edited September 20, 2006).]