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Index: Poetry Notes

The youth tactic.

Saturday, 27 April 2013

Peter Riley: ‘Could there not be a modern poetry which is as complex and difficult as you like, and as fiercely and specifically directed towards the world’s ills, while inciting emotions of consolation, exhilaration, pride, and so forth, positive emotions, rather than being restricted to pricking the reader with the sharp points of homiletic contradictions? Well indeed there are such, and some of them are in this anthology, among a great deal of studious and sophisticated writing unable to escape from an oppositional despair – a great deal, in fact, of puritanical writing.’

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The relentless fury of Ed Dorn 2.

Monday, 18 March 2013

Peter Riley: ‘Statements in “Thesis” may not be justifiable from a rationalist point of view, but they are wrapped in royal robes of rich figuration and rhetorical gestures. Now the poems broadcast the author’s opinions unconcealed, and all the more starkly in the modes of irony and sarcasm he adopts. They are largely bare too of all sense of place as landscape with or without human figures — all we have is mockery in a desert. His extremist or hyperbolic statements now stand exposed to anybody’s questioning, especially “Is this actually true?” The wit and the deftness of script discourage us from asking the question, but it cannot be kept at bay for ever.’

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The relentless fury of Ed Dorn 1.

Monday, 4 February 2013

Peter Riley: ‘n undetached calm is the signal feature of his poetry in the first half of the 1960s, as he carefully learns to hold language and syntax in his own terms, and the instances and concerns of the provincial and unprofessional life he lives are more and more projected outwards towards reader and world as linguistic vectors. He is clearly moving, in no rush but determinedly, towards a version of the local which remains local but of greater reach. He remained local for ever; even on the other side of the earth thirty years later…’

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Can there be a modern ‘working-class’ poetry?

Thursday, 20 December 2012

Peter Riley: ‘There is no focus on the workers as a class at all, but there is on working, and a certain defiance in the freedom with which he disposes his poems as suits him or as he finds the world, which reminds me sometimes of the defiance with which Clare pursued the particulars that interested him rather than agree to the more “philosophicall” writing that his patrons would have preferred.’

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The ‘infinitely expandable’ minimalism of Anthony Barnett.

Thursday, 25 October 2012

Peter Riley: ‘Anthony Barnett’s is a very distinct brand of poetry, only tenuously connected to the work of his contemporaries, and to very few of them. To him the works of British and American poets at large, especially those gaining big sales and official endorsement, are simply contemptible – “lies”. They are lies because they are untrue to the nature of written language as a multiple instrument where sense includes silence and every item of meaning carries a load of echoes and exceptions, and they are untrue to their materials in experience and the world.’

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Genetically modified.

Wednesday, 19 September 2012

Peter Riley: ‘There was a sense of a rather shaky solidarity of the innovative, the only major flaw in which was an evident lack of interest on the part of these and other foreigners in the innovative British poetry with which we surrounded them. None of us ever got a reciprocal invitation. Ten to twenty years later it all feels rather different. If I now think there are problems with a lot of this poetry, am I betraying a trust or exhibiting my own faltering instability?’

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The prosaic declarations of ‘world poetry’.

Sunday, 19 August 2012

Peter Riley: ‘It is as if a world-wide culture has sprung up in poetry which whatever the traditions of particular zones were at one time, now produces a very straightforward poetry of declarations, accounts, confessions, etc., free from interference from poetical forms, highly figurative or imaginative language, word-play or phonetic play, syntactical unorthodoxy, difficulty, literary reference, landscape, and in some cases quite free from any concept of beauty in the idea of what is a poem. Many amount to plain histories of the defeated self, especially in exile.’

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Books received Summer 2012.

Sunday, 29 July 2012

Peter Riley: I suppose the “books received” column is often assumed to be the spare parts department – various products which nobody wants to say much about, and which don’t add up to anything. In fact, given the amount of poetry publishing that goes on now, many a choice item is likely to end up in this bin, and the lack of a parameter offers the possibility of gaining glimpses of what’s going on across the field – all the various things that poets get up to.

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Alistair Noon and the English sonnet.

Friday, 29 June 2012

Peter Riley: Noon brings this to poetry through his placement of the authorial self, you could say centrally but not subjectively – it is a perfectly objective attention to particulars as a means of attaching the whole (“the general makes me more specific” – Sonnet 1). Lyrical description is perhaps a good label for what Noon gets up to. The song qualities enhance the description and the description holds the singing to realities.

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Poetry Parnassus 2012: a further note.

Tuesday, 26 June 2012

Peter Riley: Some 10,000 poems on slips of card have been rained over London by helicopter. This enterprise was the work of Chileans, who last did it to celebrate the imprisonment of Pinochet. I could have thought of a number of politicians and newspaper moguls whose imprisonment could have been celebrated in this way but unfortunately they haven’t yet been caught.

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Peter Hughes and Oystercatcher Press.

Thursday, 31 May 2012

Peter Riley: What is demonstrated by Oystercatcher is the great range possible within a broad concept of the continuity of modernism, which means in effect that whatever the ambience of the poetry there is a strongly verbal textuality. Whatever it is concerned with, however it approaches the world, it takes no words for granted, but turns them on their sides and holds them against the light until the balance of intent and accident is clear.

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Poetry Prize Culture and the Aberdeen Angus.

Sunday, 22 April 2012

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?

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Denise Riley and the force of bereavement.

Wednesday, 21 March 2012

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.

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Poetry beyond the cults and enclaves.

Saturday, 25 February 2012

Peter Riley: ‘There is of course an entire culture, with attached industries, eager to tell you that you are not alone in poetry and to make your choices for you. There are critics, festivals, prizes, courses, reading tours, institutional endorsements, etc., always ready to guide you firmly to “the best”.’

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