Thermonuclear Hand
I don't know about you all, but I sometimes wonder what's up with British poetry these days. It always seems like there has to be more going on there than I'm hearing about, if only because I hear absolutely nothing. So while Simon Armitage is hardly the Oxford-exploding, blood-guzzling, Queen-shrieking (the band, I mean) poetical assassin I secretly hope to see emerging from the Isles and their mists, it was still pretty cool to hear him read last night. He mostly stuck to clear and conventional lyrics, but his last poem was something else entirely, written in Cornish dialect and doing some really crazy things musically. I don't know if it's in a book or anything -- I think his first American-pulished collection has just come out, and the poem I'm referring to looked to just be a typewritten page he'd brought along -- but I'm definitely interested in checking out some more of his work. Also, are there any other contemporary British poets you all find vaguely interesting? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? I would've asked Simon myself after the reading but Matt Miller had him in some serious fucking lockdown.
Oh, Lucy Ives also read after that at TalkArt and totally blew my mind. Apparently she said fuck the Workshop, chucked her old poems, and wrote her thesis over last weekend or something. Heartbreaking Surrealism with a capital S. Obviously. I was totally unprepared. My hair dropped at the drop of a hat.
Oh, Lucy Ives also read after that at TalkArt and totally blew my mind. Apparently she said fuck the Workshop, chucked her old poems, and wrote her thesis over last weekend or something. Heartbreaking Surrealism with a capital S. Obviously. I was totally unprepared. My hair dropped at the drop of a hat.
posted by Steve Keezely & Liz Bramp | 11:19 AM
1 Comments:
so, i already hashed this out w/steve-o, but their's some british weirdness at www.poetry.org that might be of some interest. it's not good, but its "interesting." i wonder about english poets. i mean, phillip larkin was their biggest poet thru the 80's, not to mention ted hughes, who, though i think he is intriguing actually (powell's has shitloads of remaindered hughes, so i've gotten to know that possessor of chiseled jaw quite well), the only weirdness in his life seems to have been a wife who stuck her head in an oven.
but, you know, it seems like the reaction against modernism was pretty extreme there, john betjeman & the irish being prime examples (heaney and shitheap muldoon.)
the interesting thing of course, is that british art in the '90s was so explosive and volatile. damien hirst and his shark in formaldehyde and all of that. tracy emin(sic) and her rock star things. and certainly, as i remember tony's brother ian having once said, lit is about 10 years behind the visuals, but i think in england they actually get farther apart, if anything.
i think also, that so much more energy has continued to go into a high/low rock music type thing there, that that movement probably siphons off some of the innovation. but this may be the bias of a formerly anglophiliac music guy.
the artists though, still seem really influenced by americans, c. sherman and goddam jeff koons, and all that crap.
i always feel like english poets must be overburdened in a way too - their lit, esp. shakespeare, being such a major tourist attraction and the tradition really cementing their cultural superiority, that they really couldn't have had people like whitman and williams. they didn't seem to rebel against themselves enough...though i think it would be impossible to be an english poet after like, browning and hardy and yeats...and especially eliot, who needed england's cultural shit to see his own fucked up - itude. anyway, larkin expresses this burden beautifully in that poem about the church...uh..."church going."
this is all speculation anywa - it's so strange thay they share our language, but we sort of command it.
author, authority, master, mastery.
ha ha ha ha ha ha.
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