letters
peter gruffydd, 8051 neufahrn, brachvogelweg 4, germany
Annwyl Pete,
H'are? Forgive long silence but been too occupied with the semi-legal thieving called earning-a-living to write. Sometimes life could be summed-up as fifty people with one thin wallet between them...
You asked me to give forth or whatever on the last (no 13) 2nd Aeon. Well, aye, living in my own inflammable straw-hut, surrounded with unbalanced arsonists as touchy as myself, I'll be careful .. but, there's crap and good stuff. Always impressed with the poems from John Tripp. You seem to print his more unusual stuff - known as he is as a fervid nationalist-type poet to most. More, please. The rest of the po em s print ed allover the bloody page are mostly the usual horseshit but entertaining for all that, until it palls, like crosswords on a rainy day. I see Henri reads poetry in the shithouse; a neurotic habit though with critical advantages. Positively 2nd Aeon tries, at least, to spread the themes, expand the minds and horizons, rather than cling to the totems of decay, rotting ancestors, worms in the vestry, gluey sentiment over a past which never existed as some paint it, etc.
The danger you run in 2nd Aeon is fug, fog or the monotonus-chug, as I call it: too much deliberate "experiment", which is no good unless it's really forced from within, by new meanings, new consciousness, increased consciousness, etc; not done because it's modish or lets one out of the sweat of searching for the core of what one's trying to say, or because it's new, challenging and all that. It's verse-aboggle and, very sadly, old-fashioned indeed. Many don't seem to realise that sentimentality, hysteria, diarrhoea, screams, periods, anger, love, joy, hate, peace or tides of words alone, when spread in fragments over a page are no better than sentimentality and the rest when read on cracker-mottoes, school-desks, old envelopes, neat editions of prissy rhyming-couplets called "Life with Mother" or "Herbage: a phantasmogoria" or "Memorabilious". Calling books "Mincing Motherfuckers" or "Steel: a begging-bowl" or "Krapp" or "Bum" and other advanced words designating an advanced, tough, modern sensibility doesn't change the contents. When is somebody going to bring out a mag called "Retch" or "Piss-
pot". Why not? Should be arresting sell-outs. But, despite these generalised, incohate criticisms carry on trying-out if only because of some out of the ordinary poems, like one or two of Bruton Connor's.
Forgive cloacal tone of this note. Tell the boys in the back and front rooms that I'm enjoying, in my own fashion, this "exile", temporary.
Peter.
Page(s) 125-126
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