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Action Stations!

The Guardian online has noticed Eyewear had a literary debate with Sean Bonney, recently, and mentions it within the context of literary feuds. It's a fun article, and good to see.

However, the criticism in the post, that I sometimes write on this blog in a sort of postgraduate-speak misses the point: sometimes I do, sometimes I don't - and the flexibility not to have to speak like a mouthpiece for Comrade Stalin, or Adorno trashing Jazz, is the difference in the world between those who think Goethe was a rebel or a philistine. He, was, of course, both. Hence, complicated, and neither.

Eyewear believes poetry can be, variously, fun, engaged, and postmodern in its reference to pop culture - but it doesn't have to be. Poet-critics like Bonney have a bee in their bonnet about what Poetry Has To Be. Such diktats don't do poets, or poems, any good.

Poetry should be ethically engaged, indeterminate, linguistically innovative, or lyric - as it wants. Style is the key. Better to read a good Larkin poem than a bad one by Trevor Joyce; and vice versa. Ah, but shouldn't we stop apple-and-oranging all the time? Read (and write) poems according to one's lights - not in darkness. Meanwhile, some literary feuds are sadly one-sided, and go on too long. Those who say politics has no part in poetry fail to realise how deeply many of the most serious poets are implicated in debates over poetics, which is politics by another name: how you write a poem says how you want to make the world.

Comments

Sean Bonney said…
I don't wanna be drawn into this, but I will say that Stalin has nothing to do with anything I said, or anything to do with Marxism. Nor do I care about 'what poetry has to be': I was arguing with you about (1) your limited knowledge of pop culture and (2) the way in which you try and tell the 'avant-garde' what they should be doing, when you clearly don't know who any of them are, other than the 'famous' ones. Adorno, by the way, was a big fan of the Slits.
EYEWEAR said…
Sean, coming from you, "I don't wanna be drawn into this" is the hight of absurdity, or rather, hypocrisy. Aren't you the self-styled provocateur, developing a unique poetics of insult etc? You drew yourself into this, when you began to leave messages at Eyewear, attacking poets you don't admire, on a quite personal level. At any rate, I am puzzled as to why you continue to insist I don't know anything about alternative culture. As a longtime poetry editor of Nthposition, and several small press anthologies, since 1988, I've published and promoted alternative poets - and through many poetry cabaret events since 1989, have done the same, often also working with alternative bands - including great Ska band The Kingpins, from Montreal. Of almost any UK-based poet-critic, I am open to alternative poetries and performers, so continue to wonder at your ferocious self-propelled animosity to me. I've never even met you. As for political poetry, I spent all of 2003 dedicated to the poets against the war movement; I'm hardly a disengaged figure, but a strong advocate of praxis as well as theory - so what's your beef with me, really? Sure, I sometimes question Salt, as much as Faber - but also have time and space for poets from a broad spectrum. Is it the interest in diversity and tolerance that bothers you, or the fact I admit to owning a TV and sometimes watching it? I'm just honest enough to admit I live in a world of entertainment - but that doesn't mean I don't read that product with suspicion.
Steven Waling said…
I must admit that a lot of this argument is begining to look tired. I mean, I really don't care which of you is the most "alternative", "avant-garde", "vanguard", or whatever. Playing "more left-wing than thou" meant that Mrs Thatcher was in power for two long, and has probably led to the current rise of "New (Old Capitalist) Labour."

Not that I think you shouldn't have discussions about the different alternative paths (are the Slits more radical than Derek Bailey? Is Bob Cobbing more radical than Prynne?) But let's be civil to one another.

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