Spring Blackbox

The new number of the excellent Blackbox Manifold is now 'live' @:

http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/

Any publication that juxtaposes Ron Silliman and Matthew Sweeney should be applauded for its critical inclusivity.

That Which Collected Itself

                                          
' Lost in some confusion of integrity, I had to tell the truth, however unreal, and persisted toward its realization, even though unthinkable. So writing, in this sense, began to lose its specific edges, its singleness of occurrence, and I worked to be open to the casual, the commonplace, that which collected itself.'
    Reams of enthralling stuff in the Collected Essays of Robert Creeley, which Ron Silliman gave a link to last Tuesday (16th Nov). Creeley's prose is as subtly measured and elliptical in syntax as his poems, which I've always found startling and unprecedented despite mainstream disfavour.
   As well as generous writerly insights into both antecedents ( Whitman, Lawrence, Pound) and contemporaries (Zukofsky, Bunting, Olson, Dorn) , he perhaps writes most vividly about his own poetic processes, especially in the piece quoted from above ("Is That a Real Poem or Did You Just Make It Up?") The counter-academic sense of deep-felt integrity it imbues is inspirational.

Identity Parade 2

                                         
Returning to my reflections on Identity Parade, I wanted to briefly expand on the sense of generally high quality of poetry-writing around today I gained from the book. This for me is characterised by several phenomena which have invariably been wanting in all but the anomalous best of post-war poetry.
   Firstly, what I can only distinguish as a rediscovery of confidence in the possibilities of poetry in English, the overcoming (at last!) of what A. Alvarez in the Introduction to his original New Poetry anthology (1962/66) called "the Gentility Principle", the "elaborate defence mechanism" which has involved a longterm entrenched anti-Modernism, a generalised resistance to foreign influence and a retrograde conservatism epitomised in the disproportionate lionisation of Philip Larkin. In a recent post on Eyewear Todd Swift suggested that the main influences on younger British poets remained "Larkin, Hughes and Plath" and that left-of-field tendencies had been overstated: "they remain charming, lyrical and conservative" (which sounds like trying to cram dozens of poets into one Todd-shaped mould). I fail to detect any Larkinesque influence in Identity Parade (Hughes and Plath in places, yes): the progression away from tight stanzaic forms and polite bicycle-clipped ironies is very apparent. It's clear that a canon of much more inventive, challenging poets has become important: Mahon, Muldoon, Prynne, Harsent, Michael Donaghy to name but a few, as well as figures from the previous generation such as Sean O'Brien, John Burnside and Kathleen Jamie.
   Secondly and allied to this is a new openness to poetries from abroad, which seem to many of the poets as formative as UK sources. The impact of American work, in particular, is gratifying to see: for a writer who died in 1966 the belatedly widespread influence of Frank O'Hara comes as a wonderful surprise. Ashbery and the other New York Poets also seem very current, as do other poets as diverse as Elizabeth Bishop, Jorie Graham and Charles Simic. But the work of presses like Bloodaxe and Carcanet (and magazines like Modern Poetry in Translation and The Wolf) in widening the net of available translations has meant an ever richer array of multicultural poetry coming through to us and this seems to have filtered into quite a few of these poems.
   Thirdly (and again a related point) is the breakdown of the hackneyed opposition between mainstream and experimental/avant garde poetries that previously hampered so much dialogue and innovation (and which even as intelligent a critic as Ron Silliman still perpetuates with his own School of Quietude/Post Avant division). A good many of the poets in Identity Parade seem to base their practice on models from both camps; or rather, they decline to limit themselves to one set of procedures and prefer to utilise all the models and strategies available to them, which to me seems to be the only course of action to follow if a poet wants to remain vitally alive to their own thought-processes, craft and intuitions.
 

My Favourite: Jacket

The new edition of the extraordinary e-zine Jacket 40 is out already, although labelled 'July 2010' - crammed with fascinating stuff as ever by the looks of it. In fact I'm still on Jacket 39, really getting into the Features on Ron Silliman and Bob Perelman, two Language poets about whom I've never come across any criticism before: especially interesting is this essay on Silliman and this interview with Perelman about his poem 'Flat Motion'. These Features on individual poets amount to whole collections of critical perspectives on his or her work and are perhaps the most brilliant and instructive aspect of all about Jacket. In fact there's another excellent one in 39 on Nathaniel Tarn, another undervalued figure.

Preambling

'I visit a lot of US blogs that are engaged in a wide-ranging debate about poetry and poetics and culture. E.g. R Silliman, M Scroggins, P Lu, S de Deo, B Watten, L Jarnot, K S Mohammad, G Huth, E Tabios, JP Kervinen to name a few good ones. And their focus is naturally US poetry though the philosophy might be more international. Now the question is, do you know of any UK Blogs with a focus on UK poetry that are operating anything like this kind of wide-ranging but detailed debate? I expect there must be some around, but I don't happen to know them - the good ones I know are mostly quite unambitiously anecdotal (great book, terrible news, what's on my hifi).'
 This is Michael Peverett, from as far back as 2006. I'm not sure whether the situation has changed very much in the intervening years( although I make no claims to being an authority on the blogosphere.) Despite notable anomalies like Gists and Piths and one or two others, it is still to US blogs like Silliman's that one turns for "wide-ranging but detailed debate" about contemporary poetry; "unambitiously anecdotal" ones still seem to predominate over here.
  I flag this up less as a statement of my own ambitions in starting a poetry blog - which are at present both  modest and tentative - than as an indication of the kind of thing I want to avoid. The focus will be much more on poems, poetry-volumes and poetic theory than on myself as a poet: if this has any value as a shared forum it is as a provisional working-through of reflections and ideas on reading and composition that might have some interest or resonance for external viewers.
   As the title 'Ictus' implies, I'm particularly concerned with formal and prosodic issues, though again the challenge is not to lapse into the eye-wateringly tiresome nerdiness that often accompanies such writing. This was in fact why the polysemous word 'ictus' seemed so apt: the stress of the poem can perhaps be as vital as the pulsing of blood or as disconcerting as the convulsive movements of a seizure.
   I'm also interested in lots of other things as well as poetry - literature in general, music, art, culture, politics, language - and I'm sure elements of all of them will seep into these posts also.
   I already feel myself lurching towards the self-indulgent and this is above all what I want to fight shy of. There are already too many blogs out there that seem to recall Frank O'Hara's Autobiographia Literaria:

And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine!