Fears in the Tense

 Pleased to receive the new Tears in the Fence today, a handsomely wintry book-length collection with poems by Simon Turner, Carrie Etter and Rupert Loydell and critical content from the likes of Ian Brinton and a much-under-read poet I greatly admire, Anthony Barnett. There's an excellent review of Ed Dorn's Collected by Peter Hughes and also a rather convoluted piece on Jorie Graham's The Taken-Down God Selected in there by who's that Dixon guy?
    Potential Xmas present for that awkward relative? Get it here: http://tearsinthefence.com/

Burying The Year

                                                                


Deryn Rees-Jones

 If you're looking for something to read as a distraction from the grotesque ordeal of Xmas shopping  - or stuck at home like me with this horrible noro-bug that's doing the rounds - try the latest online edition of New Welsh Review (98). It's a remarkably diverse and substantial gathering, laced with ideas and politics to spice up the literary offerings; a brilliant refutation of Richard Dawkins' atheistic bullyings, for example, a travel-piece on Havana, and a rescusitation of the brilliantly-named Welsh prose-writer Oliver Onions. I have a review of Deryn Rees-Jones' strikingly elegiac Seren volume Burying the Wren right at the end, certainly the most moving book of poems I've read this year.
   The round-up of the year edition of The Wire magazine ('Rewind 2012: The Year in Underground Music') is also well worth checking out, whatever your musical allegiances. Mostly alerts me to all the interesting stuff that has passed me by this year. Are their tastes softening perhaps? Bryan Ferry is featured on the Invisible Jukebox and I never thought I'd see a new Bob Dylan album at no.7 on the Releases of the Year rundown...
   Also just got a link to the new Blackbox Manifold, another trove of strong writing with poems by John Peck, Carrie Etter, John Wilkinson and Ian Seed and a lengthy appreciation of Peter Robinson.

The 'Intimidating Legacy of the Past': Hill and Enright

 

                          
  One of the most interesting items in the latest PN Review (198, March-April) is an overview by Jeffrey Wainwright of 'Geoffrey Hill's First Lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry'. Even in his concise synopsis, Wainwright gives a vivid sense of the profundity and complexity of Hill's discussion (clearly cognate with the themes of his work in verse) of poetry as perjury, his insistence on the need for an 'ontological' reading of poems which 'adds to the stock of available reality' and his wondering if there are poets today 'working at a pitch equal to the demands set by the history of poetry'.
    A field of influence restricted to other contemporary poets and a scope of reading not much broader than the latest magazines and e-zines seems a besetting flaw of much current poetry, particularly by younger writers - along with this comes a sort of passive acceptance about the nature and status of received poetics, and a wholesale avoidance of the intellectual engagement with poetry and language as contested historical phenomena which Hill urges as central to the poet's endeavour.
   By chance I found similar notions promulgated by DJ Enright (not actually - lest I start sounding too old-bufferish - a poet I've ever warmed to) in his Intro to the Oxford Book Contemporary Verse 1945-80 from as far back as 1979:

'Here are writers who have spared themselves the discomforts attendant on what W. Jackson Bate has termed 'the remorseless deepening of self-consciousness before the rich and intimidating legacy of the past' through the simple expedient of ignoring the past...chiefly for the young and for busy people who look for quick returns: the type of writing which, abandoning the ancient poetic habit of making connections between one thing and another as either vulgar or  old hat or 'academic', gives itself up to unconnected whimsies, velleities or spasms.'

    Just seen that Carrie Etter has a podcast of the Hill lecture on her blog:

http://carrieetter.blogspot.com/2011/03/geoffrey-hills-first-lecture-as-oxford.html