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Dear Tim Kendall,
 
     I write in response to Anne Stevenson’s article (‘Defending the Freedom of the Poet’, Thumbscrew 12), with which I find myself in sympathy in many respects. However, I would question her dismissal of “any course or category that defines itself as Women’s Poetry”.

     I feel she has succumbed to the temptation of regarding categorisation as an objective rather than a subjective process which different groups at different times may impose in order to make more sense of their own worlds. While I would agree it is impossible to separate the writing of women at different periods from their historical and literary contexts and that all writing is more fully appreciated when those contexts are recognised, nevertheless I believe it is possible to gain new insights about poetry by women by regarding them in that light. I cannot see that it is any more bizarre to compartmentalise writing by gender than by century or nationality.

     Courses and categories are created by readers to help them with their reading. Anthologies of women’s poetry and feminist criticism have led me to an understanding of poetry by women which I might not otherwise have reached. I might cite as an example the work of Sylvia Plath, which for many years I resisted, but which I valued much more highly after reading it as “women’s poetry” beside other twentieth-century women poets and against the backdrop of the feminist debate.

     My second disagreement with Anne Stevenson’s article is in her use of the word “apolitical”. I think she has shown in her own argument that poetry always arises from “particular ideas and prejudices” and is therefore always political. What it is not or should not be is political dogma and it is the great virtue of poetry, perhaps, as she has argued, through its symbolic or hermeneutic nature, that it can comprehend complexities and contradictions that politics of dogma do not allow. Poetry permits poets to tell truths they would not be able to write in prose.

Yours sincerely,

Kathleen McPhilemy

Dear Thumbscrew,

     Alice Fulton’s essay, ‘Fractal Amplifications’, in Thumbscrew 12, is full of theory but short on perception of how poetry is made. This is illustrated by her juxtaposition of Eliot’s lines of personal desperation – “On Margate Sands./ I can connect/ Nothing with nothing” – with Pound’s attack on the decadence that followed the fall of the Han Dynasty (A.D. 220): “HAN sank and there were three kingdoms/ and booze in the bamboo grove/ where they sang: emptiness is the beginning of all things”. The drive of The Cantos is against the nihilism of the line she quotes. I suggest she reads that wonderful poem again.

Yours sincerely,

William Cookson

Dear Tim Kendall,

     Congratulations on Alice Fulton’s paper in Thumbscrew 12. This is not only a beautiful and astonishingly lucid piece of writing, but a seminal contribution to the poetic millennium. For me it’s up there with Albanian poetess Alina Kalos’s ‘Transgressing the Pentameter: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of the Quantum Sonnet’, an essay which, as postmodern readers of Thumbscrew will know, revolutionised our understanding of what fourteen lines of poetry could do. Kalos, you will remember, disappeared into thin air. Rumour has it her unfinished Ph.D. thesis concerned the aleatory incidence of cynghanedd in the Notebook poems of Dylan Thomas; if so, this represents a blow to Welsh poetry which can scarcely be quantified. Perhaps some skilful and dedicated scholar – Sheenagh Pugh, for example – can be persuaded to complete it. It’s to be hoped that a similar fate doesn’t overtake Alice Fulton. We cannot afford to lose theorists of her kidney.

Yours sincerely,

Richard Poole

Editor’s Note: Thumbscrew has received more comments about Alice Fulton’s essay than about any previous contribution to the magazine. About two-thirds were anti-, including one which asked why we bothered publishing Americans. Other readers, though, were grateful for the essay.

Dear Thumbscrew,

     Surely, in this age of a myriad charisma-dripping poets, you can find one more worthy of gossip than me. I can only hope that those readers who sent in clippings from my diary of the New Blood Tour (or Sleeping with Planet Alice as it is otherwise known) found it amusing, rather than worthy of some pseudo-Pseuds Corner. As to which of my fellow travellers I offered the apple of discord, well, in the end, they all felt like sisters to me. With such an Alpha male as Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley accompanying us, what chance for a shy and surly wretch as I?

     Also, my contention that “there are only a score or two UK poets who matter at any one time” has received quite a lot of feedback (mostly positive, from poets who assume they are among the score or two), but it was simply, as you surmised, a bit of muscle-flexing from a Young Turk. I’ll be an old fart soon enough, so please allow me my angry young man phase. Since, at the time, I was creating a series of Poetry Lists for the Poetry Society, I thought I would make out a list to try my theory. I reckoned on about 75 “who matter”, but, yes, less than two score if you drop the Irish, the Anglo-Americans, those whose better work is long behind them and (as one of my peers recommended) any poets under 40.

     It was Anthony Thwaite’s “we are too many” quote which I was recalling, not Yeats’s (and don’t assume Yeats was first to sound that weary note). Thwaite’s poem records the many scribblers present after some main event a generation ago, though for every resounding name, there are two already forgotten. This is what haunts me. The subject of hierarchy is one of poetry’s taboos, of course – all move up one when somebody dies, slide down the snake of a bad review, throw again for having become agreeably grey and plump etc. One feels for Jo Shapcott and Don Paterson, who recently had to select 100 British poets to commission for the forthcoming Salisbury Festival and Picador Last Words anthology. Even among those, there is miaowing over whose poem is to be skywritten, whose is tattooed on a young lady’s bottom and whose ends up on a beermat or a hairdresser’s window. All good, clean fun.

     Anyway, it’s good to feel appreciated, if only for my faults.

     Best Regards,

     Roddy Lumsden