Dear Tim Kendall,
Thank you for publishing Chris Agee’s piece on Bosnian poetry, ‘Under Siege’. This was informative, profound and stimulating. There is much I could write about it, but I will limit myself to one observation.
Agee quotes Marko Vesovic: “This is probably the only war in history planned and led by writers”. Agee goes on to conduct a serious meditation on the theme, “poetry and virtue are not the same”. Radovan Karadzic, he writes, “unsettles the very notion of the general beneficence of literature”.
I would like to take this argument back at least as far as the eighth century B.C. Let me quote, simply, a passage of poetry from Isaiah, though some of this is also in prose. It is described as an “oracle concerning Babylon”. In it, the writer exults in revenge: “I myself have commanded my consecrated ones, have summoned my warriors, my proudly exulting ones, to execute my anger[...] Whoever is found will be thrust through, and whoever is caught will fall by the sword. Their infants will be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses will be plundered, and their wives ravished” (Isaiah 13:3, 15-16).
Scholars do not attribute this particular chapter to the historical Isaiah. The voice, however, of bloody revengefulness, triumphalism, and mercilessness directed at neighbouring nations runs through the historical dramas recorded in the preceding books of the Bible. Indeed, under Joshua, the genocide of neighbouring peoples to allow the settlement of the promised land was straightforward theocratic policy.
My observation is this: the establishment of the promised land, by the means adumbrated here, is achieved by one justification alone, the will of Yahweh. Since without Yahweh the God of Christ is unthinkable, I suggest we tread very carefully indeed in the politics of the Balkans. For the God of Islam is also unthinkable without Yahweh.
Yours sincerely,
Sebastian Barker
Dear Tim Kendall,
I greatly appreciated Wayne Burrows’ attempt (Thumbscrew 11) to explore ‘Poetry and Complexity’, having been myself exercised by an aspect of the same problem a few years ago (‘Obscurity in Current Poetry’, Envoi 112, 1995).
I don’t think serious readers ought to have a problem with the “difficulty” of poetry – and, of course, there are different kinds of it and reasons for it, not all to do with our (or Eliot’s) notion that our civilisation is peculiarly complex. What seems to me the greatest problem in this area (with current poetry in mind, but of course the problem is recurrent) is obscurity.
“Obscure” is a pussy-footing label which lets both poet and reader/reviewer off the hook by its non-committal refusal to impugn the competence of either, and is often a cowardly substitute for “unintelligible”: would we agree that poetry which is unintelligible is just bad poetry? Or that the difficulty of poetry is sometimes not the fault of the reader but the poet’s incompetence? Or that any sensible reader of difficult poetry which proves, after a fair trial commensurate with its nature, to be unintelligible is entitled to give up on it?
One of my problems with Wayne Burrows’ thoughtful and thought-provoking article was its reluctance to name enough names and to quote samples: I could cite dozens of poets, from my reviewing, who are famous, are difficult because they are obscure (i.e. unintelligible), but have seldom been accused of writing Emperor’s Clothing poetry and have been given the benefit of many doubts by publishers, critics, reviewers and readers who have had neither the courage nor the sensibility to cry “Enough!”
Yours sincerely,
Eddie Wainwright
Page(s) 42-43
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The