[New-Poetry] What Are Odds Quoted for Armitage and Duffyat theLondon Bookmakers?

[David Bircumshaw]

Rob:
> The only people I know who understand Prynne are Candice Ward and Roger
> Collett.  Both have tried to explain him to me but neither succeeded.
I can get by with the earlier work but the later stuff... for a while 
once I thought I grasped what was going on but have had to concede I 
don't (with the Prynne acolytes I remember getting an earnest b-c 
message from one telling me in no circumstances to take any note of 
Candice's accounts of Prynne's poems - it seems only the initiated with 
access to the Master have the right to know)
which brings me to:

> But wouldn't Prynne be *acceptable avant guard?  Jeezuz, a 
> CULibrarian, yet! 
exactly. This seems to be one of the paradoxes of the avant-garde: it 
claims to be politically left, and many of its members are genuinely so, 
but at the top of the alternative tree you seem to have an elite that is 
even more restrictive than the orthodox one. I get an increasing sense 
that the argument isn't about the fact of cultural management but about 
who gets to exercise it.
Prynne's poems constantly place the reader in a subordinate position.

> Hey, I'd put money on Fenton!  He'd get whatever the UK version of the 
> New
> Formalist vote is.
>
>        [John Lucas would approve.]
Yeah, I think it might be Fenton if neither Armitage or Duffy want the post.

Best

Dave




-- 

David Bircumshaw
Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk