Double review of American Hybrid
 

From The Fortnightly Review:

"Three years ago, a renowned publisher of doorstopping anthologies weighed in on the topic of sweeping changes in American poetry. The editors claimed a ‘hybrid’ had been created by the blending of traditional and experimental forms. Has the argument succeeded? Is the ‘hybrid’ the beginning of a new species of American poetry? Or is it a literary mule? A double review of American Hybrid by Peter Riley and Anthony Howell."

From Riley's review:

For all the vaunting of hybridity there is a clear contempt for “the traits associated with ‘conventional’ [why the scare-quotes?] poetry, such as coherence, linearity, formal clarity, narrative, firm closure, symbolic resonance, and stable voice.” (Introduction p.xxi). After 50 years’ involvement with British or any other radical poetry and its apologists you start to long for these things like a thirsty traveller in the desert.

Duncan

In an idle moment, I started to read this, but it proved far too long for my goldfish-like attention span.

However, I came across this question: "Aren’t all species former hybrids?" Speaking as a sporadic gardener, surely this is the exact opposite of the reality?

Don't get involved, Duncan. What's a nice guy like you doing with such folk? No good can come of it. Mark my words.

The guy says there are British poets living in stone cottages in the northern hills. What can he mean?
Ann Drysdale lives in a Welsh cottage but that's the western hills. Hugh MacDiarmid (is he still alive; he would be over 100) lived in a stone cottage south of Edinburgh. But neither Ann nor mad MacDiarmid worship or worshipped tree gods. It sounds like something from 'Straw Dogs'. George Mackay Brown lived in Orkney and probably in a stone cottage. But that's going back a bit. Modern British poets have central heating. And of course nobody says 'I'm a British poet'. We are English or we are of the celtic persuasion.

Well, John, curiosity is a strange thing. It can have us looking in strange cupboards without any motivation beyond the fact that the cupboard was there.

Duncan

Miss Twye was soaping her breasts in the bath
When behind her she heard a meaning laugh,
And, to her amazement, she discovered
A wicked man in the bathroom cupboard.

You see where looking in cupboards can get you!

Yeah, especially if the man in the cupboard is Gavin Ewart, and his wickedness takes the form of two false rhymes.