particle-beam velocity and the interior world of romance
The excitement!
Ms Baroque has a lot of friends, as many regular readers must realise. Some of these friends are doing wonderful things all over the place, and achieving great recognition, and many of these have been rhapsodised about on this blog in various degrees of shameless puffery. You know I'm never embarrassed to shamelessly puff (as the actress said to the bishop...) my friends. However, even within that context I have just received an email that made me excited.
Because this one is about Liane Strauss, my very dear friend and one of the most exceptionally talented poets I know of. Her work itself is exciting, thrilling in the same way as riding a roller-coaster is. Its sheer verbal and logical momentum - or, as Clive James says, its "particle-beam velocity" - sweeps you along almost centrifugally. (How's that!?) I have my own personal reasons for being happy to see Liane's work getting the exposure it deserves (not least the fact that she takes her inspiration for titles from Radiohead, and that I was sitting next to her when she first workshopped a lot of these poems);* but my reasons for posting it here are that you should read it.
Her poetry is always, first and foremost, poetry - this is a good thing. The momentum builds out of the words themselves, heady and hyptnotic - not out of some complicated structure of information she's trying to hit you with, as so often happens... As Mallarmé said, "you don't write a poem with ideas, but with words." Liane's poems bear out this truth both implicitly and explicitly.
And they're often funny.
Check her out here:
"One of the pleasures of building this section of the website," (writes Clive James) "is to have been plunged into the poetic world of the late Michael Donaghy, whose alumni are disproportionately represented on my guest list. If he gave them water to drink during seminars, there must have been something in it. Among the leaders of a pack that seems to consist almost entirely of leaders, Liane Strauss has got something going in her poetry that it took Donaghy himself adequately to describe.... Her work is helping to provide the dazzling evidence that there is a new school of poets in London for whom the Atlantic has simply disappeared" (etc).**
Clivejames.com also features Isobel Dixon, Olivia Cole and Simon Barraclough, as well as other poets,*** and many examples of James' writing (there are several articles I want to bookmark) - altogether a site worth a visit; see my sidebar.
* I will confess here in public that, when it got workshopped, Lady Suwō made me cry.
** I am getting quite a bit of feedback lately to indicate that I too am a member of this "school", though my work is nothing like Liane's. How exciting!
*** I say "other" - the list includes the great Les Murray...
5 comments:
So what's this new school of poetry called and how does one identify poets who are members?
Well, Jim, I'm not really sure it's called anything... Clive James has simply made this interesting observation. It's been written of me that my poetry is both American and English, that I have access to a double heritage - & I think I do blend the two sensibilities and histories. For example. And so do other poets currently working hereabouts.
There are English poets writing in London who have read widely in US poetry - of the 20th century - and who have, much more than a lot of others, absorbed the tones and approaches of, say, the New York School poets. Not so much Ginsberg, these days, or the Beats. People like Koch, O'Hara and Schuyler are very influential on poets like, say, John Stammers. But you'd still say Stammers' poetry is "English" rather than "American pastiche." Roddy Lumsden is a big campaigner for contemporary US poetry, that we should all read it, that this sort of parochialism is a Bad Thing.
One common denominator among this group of poets, as James writes - the conspicuous one, anyway, between me, Liane Strauss, Simon Barraclough, John Stammers, Olivia Cole and Isobel Dixon, as well as Annie Freud, Daljit Nagra (I think), etc - is Michael Donaghy, whose workshop we all went to. I think Roddy Lumsden used to go too, in the mists of time. Of course, Stammers now runs his own workshop, and Lumsden took over teaching Michael's two classes at City University when Michael died. Michael was himself American, of course, born to Irish parents and resident in London for nearly 20 years.
The other common denominator between Isobel, Liane, Simon and me is now, of course, Salt Publishing. Isobel's book came out last autumn, and Simon's is due in April. Mine in June. And I believe Liane is working on a manuscript for them.
The interesting thing is that James has identified this as a trend, or a "school," when the people in question all write such different kinds of poetry. I think it's fascinating to find a hidden thread, and this one rings true to me - although we were all, when we met, already writing our own particular kinds of poetry. Clearly I can't write critically about a group of which I am a member - and I should say that James hasn't read my work, so he's saying it about the others. I'm applying his remark to myself in light of what others have written about me, and in the fact that I have been working closely with these poets - especially Liane and Olivia - for years.
I should also add that the others listed, except for John Stammers, do have (along with Roisin Tierney) a formal workshop group, which I'm not in - I'm not in any kind of workshop now. They are publishing a pamphlet called "Ask For It By Name", which will be launched this Friday night at the Melton Mowbray pub in Holborn! If anyone wants to come along you can hear them read and buy a copy! 18 Holborn, Friday Jan 25th, 6pm.
Then it should be called 'The Mid-Atlantic School' - just what the world needs, another school of poetry. I still can't work out if 'The School of Quietude' is a real school or a derisory terms.
Jim, it's not a school. You asked me what I thought he meant, and I told you what I thought he meant in light of what I have myself observed in my small corner of the poetry world.
It doesn't have to be "another school of poetry" if you don't want it to be!
"The School of Quietude" is a derisory term. To quote form Wikipedia: "Arguably SoQ is used in a strictly pejorative sense because generally the critics who employ it do so in order to describe poets whose poetics they consider overtly conservative. Silliman has stated repeatedly that he adopted the term from a phrase once used by Edgar Allan Poe to describe some of his contemporaries whose ideas about poetry were a throwback to the literature of Great Britain or were overly British in their writing style. Silliman's contention is that the present day School of Quietude in American poetry are the spiritual heirs of those same Anglophile 19th century poets."
So you could argue that the School of Quietude is in itself a sort of "mid-Atlantic School", by those lights! But as it's only a derogatory term based on a particular idea of "Englishness" etc, let's just not...
Thanks for that. I was being a bit facetious I hope you realise. It's just I bought myself the two volumes that comprise The University of California's Poems for the Millennium (that's nearly 1800 pages between them) and my head is just swimming at the moment with schools of poetry and poetry movements.
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