tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1648230750208763565.post6583655378345825982..comments2023-11-03T11:00:07.566+00:00Comments on Displacement: Laboratory PoetryFiona Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10052038869211775919noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1648230750208763565.post-75980359889530143702012-10-02T15:34:33.105+01:002012-10-02T15:34:33.105+01:00Tim - thanks for this. To be fair, Riley makes a d...Tim - thanks for this. To be fair, Riley makes a declaration of his own prejudices at the beginning of the review. <br /><br />It's interesting that he describes the Americans as "small-scale, meticulous", adjectives I used to associate more with mainstream British writing. But I do think it's recognisable from the US contemporary anthologies I've read, and so is the interchangeability remarked on by Howell - thanks for providing the quote, that bit of it's as damning as Riley's small-scale etc! Though neither applies by any means to all poets. <br /><br />As for British poetry, I think anything that disrupts the mainstream writing-from-within-a-small-field atmosphere is good, and yes, that does seem to be happening though I wonder how much of it could be described as radical.<br /><br />Would be interesting to hear an American comment...Fiona Moorehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10052038869211775919noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1648230750208763565.post-46758819201429241652012-10-02T07:29:58.645+01:002012-10-02T07:29:58.645+01:00Ah, a poet bored by the surrounding poetry was exc...Ah, a poet bored by the surrounding poetry was excited by some poetry he encountered in his formative years and thinks the newer stuff has taken a wrong turning. Well there's a turn up for the books.<br /><br />I too thought that "American Hybrid" leant towards the radical, but then I think that recent UK anthologies do as well. I think the latter only reflect what's in many of the more dynamic magazines. And the new anthologies (perhaps because of the selection process) show an increasing creative-writing influence. For example, in "The SALT book of younger poets" nearly all of the poets mention that they have a degree. When they mention their subject it's English or Creative Writing.<br /><br />I can't make much sense of Peter Riley's "there is only one way of making sense" unless read in the light of his later "If you can no longer talk about, you are silent". In general I don't get abstraction or minimalism in Art/Writing, but I don't mind a "truth to materials" slant - an interest in sound/letters at the cost of content.<br /><br />In Anthony Howell's companion piece there are points of agreement with Riley, but also some sympathy for abstraction. "<i>… use of abstract nouns that sounds sort of ‘French’ and transfigured and metaphysical but is actually just a mush of syntax – a species of poetic rhetoric divorced from content or persuasion. Actually you could swap chunks of this elevated text around – from one poet to another – and no one would ever know.</i>" Also "<i>The point of conjunction for realism and abstraction is that the real is never real, since there is a shift into art or artifice … . Equally, however, the abstract is never abstract</i>" and "<i>Truly original works are vulnerable, because they have to abandon something that is supposed to be there. Rhyme, for instance. That used to be a bugbear for the anti-free-versers! Today it might be absence of meaning – a criticism aimed at the abstractionists by the lyrical realists. This need to abandon some accepted rule in order to make something new accounts for originality’s vulnerability, and is why Cummings, Sitwell and Vachel Lindsey are still distrusted by a myopic establishment. The abstractionists, for their part, have set up their own taboos – narrative and signification, for instance</i>"<br />Tim Lovehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00578925224900533603noreply@blogger.com