THIS WRITING LIFE

Around & about Matt Hall's FALSE FRUITS (Cordite Books, Castlemaine, '17)
[salvaged from Facebook]

I hope this aint talking out of school, but a month ago in 'chat' with Kent MacCarter i said how i was reading Matthew Hall's book, False Fruits. "I need to get my teeth into it but at first blush the language sings, in my sense, but i dont think that's how it's supposed to rest... i need to get with the argument or dialectic..." Well, thanks to John Hawke's words at last night's launch, April 7th, '17,  we got it! Look forward to reading the speech, what amounted to a short history of the po-mo everywhichway of the lyric, the pastoral, Romanticism, etc --that is, as per Matt's project, lyric that aint lyric, pastoral that aint that kind of pastoral nor that, missus, and aint all parody since, as per Schuyler on NY poetry ca 50s (i'm throwing that in, begging yr pardon) gallons of [paint] true feeling courses it, suffuses it. And so on. Hmm. I confess the radical battle cry that poetry is violence upon language, and that all poetry shares the perspective, except of course that of the unmentionables, poetry's deplorables? --a claim i lived with myself through the 70s & 80s-- doesnt work for me in the way John announced it last night... Eeek! It's Saturday morning i think! Stuck in the middle of another dense & ingenious proposition for the Eco-poetic! Lots to think about, and the book itself to read! Congratulations everyone! It was a stimulating night!


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‪Nice memory you recalled in yr remarks last night, Matt, regarding that conference you attended several years ago and the afterparty reading at Collected Works Bookshop, at wch i particularly recall your good self and David Herd's distinctive readings...

RE- violence, and of course your book, On Violence in the Work of J. H. Prynne (Cambridge Scholars, 2015) (--just reminded myself via the abstract up on the Web, and nice to see longtime-nosee ‪Michael Tencer‬'s name there), --the violence John Hawke indicated as a general condition of the practice is NOT, i think, the point of your submission on Prynne (or, indeed, the British poetry in the vicinity of that influence or out of similar Traditional & Modernist extrapolation as the man's), wch is a very particular project... or was --i'm sure by now it's widened to the air that's breathed there, almost commonplace assumptions & similar formal expressions.

(At the beginning of your V., am reminded of Olson, ye olde Projective Verse (how sprightly they read, all these assayes of the Big O even now) --our poet, "How he conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence. (.....) For a man's problem (...) to give his work his seriousness, a seriousness sufficient to cause the thing he makes to try to take its place alongside the things of nature..." --reminded by your quotation from JHP that, like O, his poetry is another kind of human manifestation, and an imp is tickling me to suggest meta-literary, metaphysical, even of Platonism! --like for ex., Korean poet Ko Un adamant that his poetry's not to do with literature but "the universe!" --away with thee, imp!) --

I wish right here i could jump into statement of what i'm feeling (and to include something on feeling, on wch last night i thought John Hawke very good)... something about the relation to this being here, this relation to nature (and the nature of things), which is rather more interesting than literary cleaving (i mean grading) right & left & all about one! (--that vivacious intellectuality, --importunate mind, promiscuously vital --and dont i recognize that myself)...

My sentence runs away! I shall return after another helping of Fresh Fruits...!


[April 8/9, 17]