Simon Turner - Bergonzi on war poetry

This is not so much an article, more a signpost to an interesting online resource that might otherwise be overlooked: earlier today I read the text of Bernard Bergonzi's 1990 Byron Foundation Lecture, which is available here.  The lecture, entitled 'The Problem of War Poetry' (a markedly similar title to a paper I gave at BAAS last year, which might suggest an unacknowledged influence, but I can honestly claim, hand on heart, that I wasn't aware of Bergonzi's lecture until today), has as its main argumentative thrust the thesis that the poetry of the Great War has, in spite of its strengths, a problematic effect upon subsequent poetry of conflict.  In effect, when we collectively speak of 'war poets', it's Owen, Sassoon, Graves and Rosenberg that we invoke with the term, reducing poets of comparable calibre (Douglas and Lewis spring readily to mind) to the status of a footnote to their achievements.  In addition, Bergonzi - pre-empting, in embryonic form, the underlying arguments in Nicholas Murray's The Red Sweet Wine of Youth - asserts, correctly, that a problematic mis-reading of the poetry of the trenches as being chiefly anti-war in character has created the impression that all war poetry in the 20th century must therefore be pacifist in order to be of literary value, with moral and aesthetic 'good' becoming problematically conflated.  That's a summary, at least, and I have probably done Bergonzi's ideas a disservice through over-simplification: hence the link above.  Well worth reading: it's though-provoking and compellingly argued.             

A New Addition to the Links Sidebar

Because this is how I generally spend my evenings, and because the Spain-Porugal match is infinitely less enlightening than it has a right to be - the general rule of "Catholic countries = amazing football" being undermined in this instance - I found myself, whilst hunting for material on F.T. Marinetti, everyone's favourite Futurist and apologist for Fascism, stumbling across Marjorie Perloff's website.  Both of the Editors have been heavily influenced by Perloff's work - 21st Century Modernism: The "New" Poetics (2002), in particular, opened our eyes to a fascinating, if idiosyncractic reading of the history of Modernism - and it's a small tribute on our part to give her a plug here.  Her website, I should add, is exemplary, with archived reviews, essays and book extracts, with a great rolling keywords widget that is more fun (for a poetry nerd at least) than a sack full of otters.  Read and learn...   

New Addition to the Links Bar

The last few days I've been delving into Tim Kendall's War Poetry blog, and wish I'd discovered it earlier, not least because I learnt via one of his posts that Geoffrey Hill gave a lecture earlier this month in Oxford on, unsurprisingly, poetry and war.  Frustrating that I missed that, but extremely happy to have discovered Tim's blog.  I look forward to reading more in the future. 

Simon Turner - An interesting link for those in the know...

This is just a brief heads up to alert readers to a Guardian blog article by Billy Mills - poet, critic, Kurt Vonnegut lookalike, small press publisher and all-round top bloke by all accounts - about Chris Torrance's Magic Door sequence. I'm a big fan of Chris' work, and am involved in getting the Heaventree volume together at the moment, so it's wonderful to see his work getting the exposure it deserves.