Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Quote of the Week

Many thanks to Lawrence Upton, AHRC Creative Writing Fellow in the Department of Music at Goldsmiths, University of London, for the following marvellous encomium, discovered today at Poetryetc, an email list frequented largely by avant-gardists.

Mr Upton describes a critical comment I made about the experimental poet Keston Sutherland's work as demonstrating 'egotism of a high and dangerous order'.

Astonishing how just a few lines of mine quoted at random on an email list can reveal quite so much of my character.

Trying that link again: but it may be encrypted against non-list subscribers. If it won't work, you may have to google Poetry etc and possibly even join the list in order to read the archives.

6 comments:

Jeffrey Side said...

Jane, Lawrence was wrong to say that about you. Although, I think your comments on Keston were misjudged, I would not attribute them to egotism. If that were the case, then all such statements could be attributed as such, which they clearly can't be.

Jane Holland said...

Yes, his words were poorly chosen. Having said that, so were mine on Keston Sutherland, when I used the phrase 'utter charlatanism'about his work. All art, ultimately, is charlatanism, and all artists pretenders of one sort or another. So my comment could only have been interpreted as meaning that his poetry is not art. Which, on retrospect, and having spent some time looking at it further, I no longer believe.

But it's still a great quotation about me. I may use it on a book cover sometime.

Michelle said...

"Mad, bad and dangerous to know."

;)

Jane Holland said...

Especially the mad bit. Or should that be the dangerous bit? I'm never quite sure ...

Jx

Angela France said...

the link won't work for me.

Jane Holland said...

Yes, it seems to have stopped working. Not sure why.

I've tried again, but it should be easy enough to find via googling Poetryetc - the comment was made this month, i.e. October 09, under an email thread entitled something like: Jane Holland and the avant-garde. Easy to find on the list as there were rather a large number of replies. ;)