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Index: Notes & Comment

Ezra Pound and Rabindranath Tagore.

Harold Hurwitz: ‘Tagore was also a stimulus to Pound, who was not only an admirer but a disciple as well. His early contacts with the Indian poet brought forth three essays, one review, and one short story, as well as a renewed interest in Indian poetry, manifested in the translations Pound made of several poems from the fifteenth century Indian poet Kabir, which he published in the Modern Review of Calcutta in June, 1913.’

Non finito.

Anthony Howell: ‘The cave paintings have a swift, improvisatory feel. Often they are superimposed, one on another. Very small tribes may have spoken different languages, but you needed a fair number of hunters for a mammoth hunt. What this tribe called a mammoth, another called a borogove. But if the hunters from several tribes came together in a cave, you could all agree on a drawing. What are we hunting? We are hunting that!’

Zero Dark Uncertainty.

A. Jay Adler: ‘Because some critics of Zero Dark Thirty come to the film seeking in it the simplicity of an ideological stance rather than the human complexity of art, they seek to tally factual representations as politics on an abacus of acts. They lose interest in the behavior of humans.’

Who is Bruce Springsteen?

Peter Knobler: ‘Senator and former presidential candidate John Kerry says, “There’s an authenticity about Bruce that’s just incontrovertible…I think it’s because he’s so true to who he is, and people know it.” But who is he? Is he the egalitarian liberal who sang the radical anti-private-property verse of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” at President Barack Obama’s first inaugural, or is he the guy who allowed his band to be low-balled when offered contracts for a highly anticipated and financially rewarding “reunion tour”?’

The relentless fury of Ed Dorn 2.

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.’

Popping the larger question.

Anthony O’Hear: ‘In Britain at least revisionism is currently going through on the nod, with barely any of the sort of discussion which has been happening in the USA, and I’m not clear how long resistance can be effective there either in the current political climate. In Britain anyway the homosexual lobby is so powerful in the worlds of politics and entertainment that the campaign is won almost without any effort on the part of that lobby, and they know it. Woe betide anyone who works in the media or local government and dares to appear as ‘homophobic’ (i.e. supporting a privileged position for conjugal marriage). ‘

Imagining Coleridge and Evans.

Rachel Mann: ‘read in tandem, these books and their subjects resonate unexpectedly; the works, as different as they and their subjects are, possess some intriguing similarities of genre and of form. Both invite readers to question what type of texts they are reading and where such texts fall in the range of accepted literary genres.’

The relentless fury of Ed Dorn 1.

Peter Riley: An 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…’

A pataphysical education.

Paul Cohen: ”Pataphysics presents a challenge to reality, most characteristically, though not always, carried out through humor. Unfortunately, as Andrew Hugill notes in his new book on the subject, “the word is often used quite loosely to invoke anything that seems wacky, weird, or bizarrely incomprehensible,” much as the word “surreal” is often used to refer to anything strange.’

Our closet imperialists.

Michael Blackburn: ‘It’s telling, of course, that neither Colley nor Naughton admit the imperial dimension of the EU itself, a dimension openly acknowledged by the Commission’s oily president, Mr Barroso. That would rather spoil their argument.’

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

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.’

The ‘infinitely expandable’ minimalism of Anthony Barnett.

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.’

The god of Athens.

Thomas Conlon: ‘Christians are panentheists in the very limited sense that they believe that 2000 years ago God became man for a short period. Any wider identification of God with any part of nature weakens the force and radicalness of the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity. Although some of his best friends may be panentheists Cooper, the biblical Christian, is not about to join them.’

Genetically modified.

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?’

Afterism.

Anthony Howell: ‘My initial take, leafing through the large Norton publication which is the anthology, is that Americans go on too long. Endless, separated, hardly ever rhyming couplets, for instance, or very long lines indeed, and plenty of them. Some of the poems here get to be as expansive as a Morris Lewis! And these Norton anthologies never skimp on pages, so, inevitably, there is lots of stuff I like, some using narrative, others more abstract. I appreciate the breezy chatty poems of Albert Goldbarth, and a poem called ‘Impossible Blue’ by Ann Lauterbach, whom I associate with the London art scene and New York.’