Letters
Dear Thumbscrew,
It must be because Edna Longley considers English poetry to be largely moribund that she cites, among her suggested models for its improvement, that galvanised corpse, ‘Genesis’. This poem seems to me to exemplify the very quality that Longley finds, in other contexts, suspect: confidence. It’s the work of a supremely confident, gifted, male adolescent (I am not, of course, referring to Hill’s age) who read the books (Blake, Yeats, Auden, possibly Dylan Thomas), felt the excitement and bought up the whole stock of by now second-hand imagery and rhetorical swagger (or what he misread as rhetorical swagger). The poem is all the more cruelly exposed by being set alongside ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ and ‘A Staffordshire Murderer’ – Longley’s other models, with which few of us would want to argue.
However, I would also point out that her “model of models” is in itself questionable. The cross-pollinations that produce great and even good poetry are usually far more bizarre and complicated a matter than a poet’s glancing back at recent and local achievements. If it were just a matter of this, perhaps Northern Irish poetry would have recruited a more substantial number of lively young practitioners in the last fifteen years, poets who as well as believing in Paul Muldoon et al., actually believe in themselves. Without that kind of confidence there are no bad poems, no good poems, in fact no poems at all.
Yours sincerely,
Carol Rumens.
Mr Kendall,
I do not wish to receive any more Thumbscrews.
To print verse as prose is an act of contempt that verges on falsification.
Regards
Anne Carson
Editor’s Note: Anne Carson alludes to Anne Stevenson’s review of her Glass and God in Thumbscrew 13. At one point Stevenson did indeed set out Carson’s verse as prose, albeit with line-breaks clearly marked. Stevenson went on to say, “I have printed out the above as a paragraph (strokes indicate line endings) to show how close to prose Carson’s writing hovers, intentionally playing down the language to show off the image. This seems to me a legitimate, camera-like technique [...]”. Readers will make up their own minds as to whether this passage verges on, or even remotely approaches, “contempt” or “falsification”.
Page(s) 57-58
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