[New-Poetry] Basil Bunting

[Gerald Schwartz]

I've always read Briggflatts like a nineteeth-century adventure story, both victorian and modern.

Few poets social activism and peregrinations reavl so much as Bunting's, who understood the rhythms and conflicts of the century and was able to translate his wisdom into verbal music so prodigious and unigue as to transfor both British and American (see Duncan, Johnson, Wiliams...) poetic landscape.

Years ago, Pierre Joris, who filled me in on B. B.'s mideast espionage career, told me the rosetta stone to his work was a tiny excerpt from his "Villion,":

Presision clarifying vagueness; 
boundary to a wilderness
of detail; chisel voice
smoothing the flanks of noise;
catalytic making whisper and whisper
run together like two drops of quicksilver

Be Seeing you,
Gerald S. 


  I've been reading Keith Tuma's By Obstinate Isles:  Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers and his Anthology of Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry for my comprehensive examinations.

  I wanted to start a conversation about a few poets that I've been reading, poets who've not been on my radar until I started reading for my exams.  So, forgive me if some of my questions of observations seem elementary or self-evident.

  By far, one of the most fascinating poets I've come across is Basil Bunting, a name I'd never heard, despite my undergraduate and graduate years as an English major.  I like Briggflats quite a lot, though I'm still grappling with the poem.  Bunting's lines with their heavy stresses and Anglo-saxon vocabulary remind me of Pound's translation of "The Seafarer."  The poem itself is a Modernist epic (I think), so I think of Eliot and Pound immediately.  

  But Bunting's concern with a particular place contrasts with Eliot's more "universal" (not quite the right word, I know--maybe "far-reaching?") concerns.  Bunting seems concerned primarily with this place (his place?):  Northumbria.  The poem burrows down into the landscape, carving itself into the land, not unlike the mason carving stone in the poem's opening lines.  Despite his concern with landscape, however, Bunting can't help bringing in a dose of mythology in a later part of the poem.  Indeed, the poem moves through seasons, cyclically, depending primarily on recieved notions--such as Spring being a time of rebirth and so on.

  So, I'm wondering, what are your thoughts on Bunting?  And why on earth is he so ignored?  He doesn't appear (a colleague tells me--I've not checked) in the Norton Anthology of British Literature.  Perhaps he's not ignored; perhaps I've just missed him.  Nonetheless, I thought I'd try to open up a conversation about a poet who really has my ear right now.

  Best,
  Jeff Newberry

  -- 




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