nothing to see here
I thought I'd blog about a subject that's recently merited a couple of posts over at The Other Room. Update: before even posting this I see my recent comment that precipitated this post has already been promoted to the front page.
It started with a fairly uninteresting and cursory article over at the Guardian about Manchester's Literary Renaissance. Various people raved over the article but it was really pretty uninformative. The Other Room posted a brief comment on it under the title We're not really here.
I and others then commented on the follow up We're still not really here, which also linked a downright peculiar article from Neil Astley in the New Statesman from 2006.
Then on Saturday last weekend (14 November 2009) the Guardian (again) published a review of Fiona Sampson's A Century of Poetry Review by Blake Morrison. Now whether his article reflects the contents of the book I can't say, but the closest he gets to mentioning the British Poetry Revival and what happened at the Poetry Society and Poetry Review in the 1970's are the two following quotes:
Controversy also surrounded Eric Mottram in the 1970s, with his radical Anglo-American poetics. [This is actually in the middle of a section about Muriel Spark's editorship.]
Several editors of the Poetry Review, including Mottram and later Peter Forbes, strenuously avoided little-Englandism, and there’s a reasonable showing of Americans and Europeans here, including Brodsky, Ginsberg, Ashbery and Primo Levi.
A more informative discussion of this period and its ramifications can be found in this piece by Robert Sheppard from Jacket 31 back in 2006. The later section of the article might suggest to a cynical reader that Blake Morrison knows perfectly well what he's talking about, and more specifically what he's not talking about.
It started with a fairly uninteresting and cursory article over at the Guardian about Manchester's Literary Renaissance. Various people raved over the article but it was really pretty uninformative. The Other Room posted a brief comment on it under the title We're not really here.
I and others then commented on the follow up We're still not really here, which also linked a downright peculiar article from Neil Astley in the New Statesman from 2006.
Then on Saturday last weekend (14 November 2009) the Guardian (again) published a review of Fiona Sampson's A Century of Poetry Review by Blake Morrison. Now whether his article reflects the contents of the book I can't say, but the closest he gets to mentioning the British Poetry Revival and what happened at the Poetry Society and Poetry Review in the 1970's are the two following quotes:
Controversy also surrounded Eric Mottram in the 1970s, with his radical Anglo-American poetics. [This is actually in the middle of a section about Muriel Spark's editorship.]
Several editors of the Poetry Review, including Mottram and later Peter Forbes, strenuously avoided little-Englandism, and there’s a reasonable showing of Americans and Europeans here, including Brodsky, Ginsberg, Ashbery and Primo Levi.
A more informative discussion of this period and its ramifications can be found in this piece by Robert Sheppard from Jacket 31 back in 2006. The later section of the article might suggest to a cynical reader that Blake Morrison knows perfectly well what he's talking about, and more specifically what he's not talking about.
Comments