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‘The Poetry of Marginalization’, in John Shad and Oliver Tearle, eds., Crrritic! Sighs, Cries, Insults, Outbursts, Hoaxes, Disasters, Letters of Resignation, and Various Other Noises Off in These the First and Last Days of Literar...

John Goodby

Pages: 43 - 62

Swansea University Author: John Goodby

Abstract

A 10-page poem, based on 'The Marginalization of Poetry' by the US LANGUAGE poet and critic Bob Perelman, which attacks British mainstream poetics and the ready academic acceptance of its bland and boring staples. Using author's own schizophrenic stance as a modestly successful poet i...

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Published: Eastbourne / Portland / Toronto Sussex Academic Press 2011
URI: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa338
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Abstract: A 10-page poem, based on 'The Marginalization of Poetry' by the US LANGUAGE poet and critic Bob Perelman, which attacks British mainstream poetics and the ready academic acceptance of its bland and boring staples. Using author's own schizophrenic stance as a modestly successful poet in official verse culture before a turn to experimental writing around 2000, it presents a brief account of the divided nature of critical discourses surrounding British poetries, and how these have emerged since the mid-twentieth century, drawing on critics as various as Andrew Crozier and Samuel Hynes. However, there are sideswipes against the too-facile incorporations of late-modernist stylistic tics in certain kinds of theory and 'creative' criticism (which miss the point that innovative writing is deconstructionist avant la lettre), and the piece concludes by making the case for overcoming polarized poetic discourses, critical and practical, by re-investigating figures who straddle, and so problematise, the fault-lines between the different camps, such as Dylan Thomas. Footnotes offer examples of the experimental and mainstream poetry of the author to illustrate these points.
Keywords: Marginalization, poetry, academia, mainstream, Bob Perelman, creative, critical, lineation, boundary, figuration, contractual language, Lacan, Kristeva, Derrida, Geoff Ward, Frank O'Hara, Valentine Cunningham, Andrew Motion, Dylan Thomas, W. S. Graham, Andrew Crozier, Salt, Shearsman
College: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Start Page: 43
End Page: 62