Ok, well have fun writing for your cat.

This is agreeable to me as a way to inform my poetry. Trying not to put words into the mouth of others – but I should think that linguistic disobedience and accessibility can not be very close friends.

What seek out when reading, what i strive to create in my work is; as Derrida described in discussing Joyce, “A Babelian declaration of war”.

A collage of sense and nonsense, snippets of Latinate or Anglo Saxon phrases, various turns of phrase, puns and bon mots, overheard conversations, bits of programming code, slang, curses, will o wisp tune lines that appear and dissipate almost as soon as remembered.

A collage, a river of language that i can vomit forth, ply upon ply, all over the page.

All of this makes for something not very accessible. But it pleases me, and the only thing we can hope for, as poets, as proletarians,as parents as &c is a sense of play and fun. That childlike feeling when one is most close to being human.

All i seek in other people poems is something that can make me think, something that i can…

Was it not Ibsen? We read not to devour, but rather for what we can plunder.

There are no errors, there are only portals of discovery, and again i must reiterate “let the common reader be damned!”

Having said that i never liked Bukowski, drunken ole sexist luser to my point of view. Much rather would read Swinburne. go figure!

ttfn

tom

But seriously, can we get beyond the binary stuff please? I'm sure there's many more ways in which we can (and should) respond to Stuart's editorial, without descending into slanging matches. I think Kate summed it up best above:

It seems disappointing and limiting to retreat to old, imaginary battle lines as soon as an editor tries to do something different and timely in Australian poetry. Knee-jerk comparisons to poetical dramas from over 30 years ago in North America can only prevent us from seeing the tall trees growing right here in our front yard… and too much beta-blocking ain’t good for the heart.

Shorter Cordite: play nice ;0)

And it's 'theses'!!!!

Sorry, couldn't stand by and watch that happen.

Best,

I can see you are quite highly trained in the art of rhetoric; especially in the manner in which you effortlessly repeat what I said, and add a ‘useful’ comment, as if to elucidate the shortfalls in my own intellectual argument. I will apologise, now, for the assumption that you are only advocating one type of poetry. And for the record I do like Buk. but he is no match for Becket, regardless of the argument.

However, you did not answer my questions:

Does popularity equate to intellectual stimulation?

Does writing anyone off who disagrees with you as snooty and pretentious, because they look beyond the scope of modernist poetry, ensure that you :

a) are stuck reading the same things your whole life

b) are only replicating Buk’s attitude as a dispossessed, and overlooked genius, sure of your own grandeur in trying to on-sell the everyman dream

c) show signs of an inferiority complex (I apologise in advance for this one)

d) perhaps just haven’t found a post-modern in; a poet or poem that excites you and allows you to create your own poetry in new and drastically altered manner, and challenge the convention of your thought

Should poetry be:

a) a short story (including line breaks), with a Hughsian penchant for the extrapolation the utmost amount of violence and power from a sentence or a line

b) a site for linguistic and intellectual intrigue designed for the creation of thesis, proof, and counterproof; instigating a tacit communication between the author and the reader, sharing common conceptions/misconceptions about language use and patterns in which to document the human condition, and the human relation to language, and in this, the pastoral issue, of the human relation to nature.

And I made the portrait vs. dada art comments to relate the fact that from the 1960’s onwards people have been making great efforts to challenge the manner in which words are read. Contemporary poetry (LANGUAGE, most 50’s onward British poetry, all Russian poetry from that period, even the basis of Concrete poetry, Marinetti’s manifesto) has been a challenge for the author to resist the mythologising of self-expression and question the assumptions with which we read narrative. To paraphrase a recent article I read: contemporary poetry asks that we interrogate our relationship with language itself, and attempt to break the preoccupation with meaning and poignancy by rejecting the most common narrative models.

So: contemporary poetry challenges the manner in which reader relates to the work, just as was asked of contemporary art. The artists of the time said: this is human expression, there is no redemption, your confusion and anger and misunderstandings are as much a part of the emotion of the piece, as is the paint itself. And to reduce this confusion and frustration to a general sign of snobbery, I think, only ensures that most great contemporary writers (Howard Barker in the UK, for example) will continue to go unnoticed or be extremely marginalised, for the simple fact that they do not fit into the criteria of traditional modernism, and dare to challenge their readers by making them think for themselves.

And my assumption about the number of thesis by each writer, can easily be verified by any University search engine. As can the 5 Trope article, with their parallel thoughts.

I hope that was un-political enough [though it wasn’t entirely poetic either, sorry for that]. If not, contact David (ed. ) and he can send on my email and we’ll be forced to meet up for a beer and further, probably quite loud, discussions.

best,

mjh