Comparing memes to poetry is enough to make any poetry teacher cringe — a few of mine probably will, after reading this. Poetry is inherently deep and memes are inherently shallow! Right? But I think the reason we gravitate toward poetry and gravitate toward Internet memes is analogous.
Peter Riley: ‘The judging criteria, being tied to a system of familiarity and recurrence, are inevitably subjective and inevitably self-propagating. What chance is there of objectivity in an art where there is no common agreement as to what constitutes its qualities?
Thomas Hardy: In a solitude of the sea / Deep from human vanity, / And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
Peter Riley: In poems of four to fourteen lines, some of them sonnet-like, Denise Riley rails against the death imposed upon her, addresses the dead son, remembers, forgets, contemplates suicide, demands that he return home. All this is focused on the one condition of loss but in a range of poetical voices rich in self-detachment, irony and mock elegy, including subsumed quotations from well-known texts.
‘Anthony Howell at Home’ is the name of an afternoon performance of readings by Deborah Dawkin, Rosalind Harvey and Anthony Howell of work by Lars Ramslie, Juan Pablo Villa Lobos, and Fawzi Karim at The Room in London N17, on Saturday, 24 March 2012, from 3pm to 6pm.
Somewhere, lost among the many disparate layers of time I myself was devoting to overlapping activities – teaching, writing, politics (somehow I’d been elected a borough councillor), was a stretch when I came to know Peter very well, to delight in his company, to like him greatly. He became the face it was extremely good news to see on entering any gathering.
All the main poetry publishers – Faber, Picador, Jonathan Cape, Carcanet and Bloodaxe – have practising poets as editors, and a house’s tone and fortunes can be radically altered depending on the poet in charge of the poems of others.
Saturday, 28 January 2012
I believe that the excessive individualism concerning the means of expression, to which we were led during the 20th century, this constant and forced hunting of innovation that Ezra Pound called “Make it new!”, all this led contemporary poetry to a dead-end.
Wednesday, 25 January 2012
Martin Sorrell: The type is blotchy, made worse by an expiring ribbon and a clutter of corrections hammered over the several typos. This ‘pomenvylope’, and the few others I’ve managed to read, speak to me of the frustration Moore lived with for the decades after brief fame had become neglect. They express the dogged endurance of a poet still possessed of a strong voice and the wish to have it heard.
Thursday, 8 December 2011
I stayed in touch with Logue for a while after our meeting. I received a couple of beautiful hand-written cards and spoke on the phone a few times, but I got the impression he was already bored of me. Then one afternoon a postman knocked at my door with a large brown tube. I opened it and inside was one of Logue’s poster poems from the 1960s, with a note of thanks inside.
Tuesday, 29 November 2011
The voice in “Tears, Idle Tears” on the one hand plays with the sense of the voice as an authentic expression of personal loss, the lyric modality of pain and suffering. And yet, on the other, the poem is supremely secondary, mediated and belated…
Thursday, 24 November 2011
THE BUSINESS OF LIVING early and working late seems like a New England virtue. Certainly, it is one that Ruth Stone, a Yankee poet, mastered perfectly. It’s not surprising that for a poet whose work – and not her celebrity – makes her “major”, it took most of us a lifetime to catch up to [...]
Tuesday, 15 November 2011
At some point I thought about how cool it might be to climb into Neil’s head, to get an idea of what he sees when he looks at his maps. Point to any area or intersection and Neil will seamlessly delve into the history of that block, that neighborhood, that business district, etc. It’s really amazing.
Owen: In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
Alan Wall: The Janus Face of Metaphor. | Clues and Labyrinths. | Ruin, the collector and sad mortality.
Poetry of ‘a detailed curiosity’.
Alan Wall: Although radically different books, both Michelene Wandor’s writing and Myra Sklarew’s exhibit a detailed curiosity regarding the minutiae of existence, whether itemising seventeenth-century trade or arachnid encounters. The threads that tie dissimilarities together, whether gossamer or memories of Lithuania, hold the poems together with an alert gracefulness.