Poems and Poetry

i. OK, I've been reading sean o'brien and about o'brien. his criticism appears on the edge of brash surlyness. for example, in the poetry review he called keith tuma's "anthology..." 'cack'.

iia. I love the end of this ugly poem though - 'fiction and the reading public' - a character, dexter, asks for books to read on death row so his friends give him 'fonda's workout book' and 'how to be a sucker' with the comment:

"Here Dex, these ought to shut you up,
Pretentious little fucker."

iib. this rhymes with p*t*rs*n's minister in 'the alexandrian library pt. 2' (??): "For fuck's sake son, get real." though there's a wobbly ambivalence in the o'brien poem: almost as if the hard stomp of the line ('fucker' unbalancing, and pulling away from the line, the plank bridge laid across by the 'little' fulcrum) is some sort of judgement some sort of agreement. which I'm not having. I'm not sure he's having it either, to be honest. am I allowed to talk like this? is this OK?

iii. apparently he thinks poetry is 'post-imaginative'. I'm not really sure what this means though.

iv. 'Hitler, that flag-waving cunt' -> 'Imagine life with nothing left/But Verdi and a wank' -> :-O -> 'o'brien often can't end a poem except by throwing in some explosion of some kind.'

v. his poems seem very coarse in that inarticulably-bad way that someone like irvine welsh or duncan mcclean both write. I'm not sure I have a problem with that or this though.

vi. he edited an anthology of poetry in response to the tuma one called 'the firebox'. derrida coined a phrase I stole in 'the tongue of fire.' I stole it when I wrote about raking through the cinders of my last relationship as a 'vocabulary of arson.' I like the cut of this jib.

vii. 'o'brien has written the definitive arse poem.' (alan munton)

viiia. "Their present is nobody's business,/ So don't talk to them about nippers// Or fires in buckets, or windfalls:/ They go for your throat not your poems." !!!!!!!!!!

viiib. this is an allusion to a l*rk*n poem, 'toads'.

ix. !!!!! cf. viii.