All entries for Thursday 28 September 2006
September 28, 2006
Oxford Conference: A Storm in a Teacup
Writing about web page http://p2.forumforfree.com/previous-vt335-thepoem.html?postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
Someone has taken my summaries of the conference and transformed them into ‘DIRT DISHER WORLD EXCLUSIVE – CARNAGE @ THE OXFORD COMA-THON’ on thepoem forum. I have to say that I did have a good laugh at it, but there are a few notes that I would like to add:
1. I don’t ask for ‘poetic unity’ in the Longley entry, just tolerance. I don’t see why people have to get so heated beacuse someone is working in a different way to them.
2. Apparently I ‘smoulder a green-eyed flash, hinting at the wildcat within’, because I say, ‘I can only think that it emerges from the difficulties of being published and poet’s insecurities’. I didn’t mean to say that Longley was insecure, just that poets tend to be. That’s teh nature of teh beast. I’ll change this so that it’s clearer.
3. Maybe this is not clear, but Buxton is not attacking Muldoon in her talk when she describes how ‘a word, line or phrase is repeated to create a wearying monotony mimetic of tedium’, she thinks that this is a good thing, something that Muldoon is using for a specific effect.
4. Perhaps I was a little harsh when I stated that I was not reporting the final speaker’s paper in the Muldoon panel because of his rude behaviour, but I wanted to show my disapproval.
5. The conference was not particularly about men and women, it’s just that I am interested in gender and so those were the sessions that I attended.
Basically the post on thepoem is made of cut-up extracts from my entries chosen to provoke the most controversy and to misrepresent the conference, which was a very worthwhile event. However it warping of the entries and the conference is very funny and I did have a good laugh at it.