Successes and Shortcomings

John McAuliffe praises a new crop of Irish poets, but wonders where the reviewers are:

Such healthy diversity is an impressive turnaround, possibly a consequence of new publishing technologies and cheaper costs, as well as the rise in festival and event nights through which publishers can sell the books. But it also suggests a question about the reception of new poetry: welcome as the emergence of presses with good production values is, is there a review culture which situates and considers these books? How are books’ successes and shortcomings judged, and who is reading them in relation to one another, in relation to poetry’s existing audience in Ireland, as well as to new audiences, and the increasingly international and wired literary culture in which English-language poetry in particular operates? Poetry Ireland Review and its associated publication, Trumpet, do clearly cover critical reviewing, as do other venues, but there are not nearly as many journals as there are publishers of Irish poetry: it would certainly be good to see both more argument and careful reading of the books written by the “Rising Generation” in the “little magazines” and online journals which would match the growth in publication of new poems.

Play It By Ear

John McAuliffe isn't entirely convinced by Paul Muldoon's foray into song-writing:

Rock lyrics, though, are far more confining and precast, formally, than the expansive long rhymed poems and brilliant sonnets and sequences of Muldoon’s poetry. At times a reader can almost hear the sounds of Muldoon’s wheels spinning as he attempts to drive the lyrics towards the territory of his poems.

Matthrew Zapruder reminds us of the difference between poems and song lyrics:

Words in a poem take place against the context of silence (or maybe an espresso maker, depending on the reading series), whereas, as musicians like Will Oldham and David Byrne have recently pointed out, lyrics take place in the context of a lot of deliberate musical information: melody, rhythm, instrumentation, the quality of the singer’'s voice, other qualities of the recording, etc. Without all that musical information, lyrics usually do not function as well, precisely because they were intentionally designed that way. The ways the conditions of that environment affect the construction of the words (refrain, repetition, the ways information that can be communicated musically must be communicated in other ways in a poem, etc.) is where we can begin to locate the main differences between poetry and lyrics.

Jason Guriel Should Get Out More

Jason Guriel's review of Seamus Heaney's Human Chain, published in the Feb/March issue of PN Review, seems to have raised some hackles. Manchester poet John McAuliffe didn't like it much, and it really rubbed blogger David Greene the wrong way. Seems a good time to point readers to this.

Don Coles Reax, Ctd

The fine UK poet John McAuliffe seems very taken with Don Coles' Where We Might Have Been.

"Born in 1927, Don Coles began publishing poems in 1975 and over the past 35 years has produced ten books which possess a distinctive tone, both casual and observant, while fiercely arranging and sequencing those seeming casual observations to make beguiling poems which combine artifice and spontaneity with unusual conviction."

Read the rest here.