लैटर टू मिचेल HOFMANN

very well, I'm sorry we couldn't co-operate on this. personally I think your the best living poet I've read.

The last reviewee I wrote to was Milan Kundera, replied with a set of his books, a nice letter in French, strawberries. Must be the swamp air there, sets a person on edge.
Milan Kundera doesn't have to teach creative writing.

The last person I wrote to in Florida was David Irving, surprisingly, in Key West, where he was vacillitating but nevertheless very approachable.

Britain - Florida - Austria -

Because Florida is where - let's not mince words - where the KKK is

and former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan his critics commonly refer to him as a white supremacist. He says he does not think of himself as

a staunchly segregationist platform.

operated a taxi stand undergoing plastic surgery
he went to Laos to teach English to Laotian military officers
He became famous on campus for wearing a Nazi uniform while picketing.

--- Michael Hofmann wrote:

> Dear Mr. Murphy,
>
>
> I fail to understand you. Given the tone of your
> remarks on my previous stuff - which you
> half-heartedly tried to concel from me, but which
> I've
> now seen, and realise I had seen before - what is
> your
> interest in anything I might have to say? Why should
> I
> do anything to give you or your views any wider
> currency? Alternatively, how can you humiliate
> yourself to the extent of approaching me in
> friendship
> and interest, when these are not your feelings?
>
> I would be grateful if you would scrub our
> 'interview'. I have no intention of answering your
> questions, and hope not to hear from you again,
>
Michael Hofmann


Dear Michael Hofmann,

I'm not sure if you know me, but I met you once in the Crown Bar Belfast after a reading.

I previously reviewed 'Approximately Nowhere' and presently I'm reviewing your Selected Poems. I wondered if I could set up an interview to be published alongside the review? Would you mind?
But only if you have the time.

best wishes,

Paul Murphy

LAMBEG DRUM

Hi, just woke up, phoned from several places at once, very confused about time and place. I haven't seen a single other person in months and can't make any connections with any people here of any kind. Its just like Kafkaesque nightmare, but a Kafkaesque nightmare is at least made crazily sensible by its unpattern. Paul Muldoon isnt a good writer, a man of the right place and the right time. There's not a poem by him I'd call visionary or revolutionary or interesting. Mind you I'd extend that to Heaney too. I just feel that modern people have lost the feel for literature as they've lost interest in living and suffering, eating real soil or sucking on visible not interactive grapes. All the other writers you mention of the modern era are much of a muchness. Mebdh McGuckian's not even very mad, refers to me as 'insane' probably a backhanded compliment, like saying 'interesting' or 'cool' or 'talented'.
I know too the apron, the lambeg drum, the cool ironed cloth and the wrinkled copy of Nietzsche at the wrong page which is not the eternal radiation or whatever but a description of nose picking in lower Baden at the seminary with the wrong shirt and lots of loo paper sticking out of yer bags (trousers). Of course Liberalism isn't working, just talking about imaginary fish doesnt reproduce them on the plate, just as dressing interactive Barbie dolls doesnt equate with sex or glamour, although they ask you to spend on it and you might if you had no sense and slept 2 hours a day, kept there by the Red Bull.
Your plucking at the grapes I ate years ago. What about the time in Baden Baden that Igor Stepanov started a blazing row by pulling the tail of a small dog thus activating the anger of its owner, then stepping into Turgenev's house and peeing in the lintel. (by the way his roof fell in upon him, also a sign of what he is flaccid, beneath a pale moon dreaming of astro-physics while being besmattered with warm, sulphuric rains)
Your a bookish, twerped, inconsolate and disregarding, try fattening a calf for slaughter, 'twill serve you better.
Now you know that now is now and not then.
best wishes


Hello Paul,

Yes, Yeats pitched language, especially his later language, to something hard to follow. Austin Clarke (1896-1974) was his anointed successor, and his dates show he was a generation later - poets between might have felt crushed. Patrick Kavangh (1904-67) did find a response, though, particularly in The Great Hunger (1942). I think you've recommended this to me in the past, and so you'll have your own opinions on it. It eschews Yeats's high style as much as it does his dictums, and resorts to the powers of narrative - not a Yeats forte. There's also Richard Rodgers (1909-69) from Belfast who was influenced by Hopkins , thereby substituting one rich language for another - which you might say is Yeats by association, or suggestion. MacNeice (1907-63) has been absorbed, almost, by the mainland...

Since then rich or fine writing has proved a hallmark of both Northern and Republic of Ireland writing. It's often proved more fruitful than British mainland poetry, and you'd have to agree that Northern Irish poetry has dominated much of the past 40 years. Poets like Paul Durcan (1944) and others in southern Ireland have moved another way, and the number of women poets on both sides - Medbh McGuckian (1950) and Evan Boland (1934?) for example, have been bolstered by quite a few like Vona Groarke (1964 - I reviewed her for the TLS in 1994) and Sara Berkeley (1967) once the great hope. As for Northern Irish poetry, Edna Longley commented acidly that NI poets were criticized 'for not leaving their enviable raw material raw enough', but were prone to metaphor etc. How dare they have it all? I still don't rate Paul Muldoon (1951) highly, and feel his example, more than his own poetry, might prove to have been what the excitement was all about.

As for Philosophers or philosophes being unread? I don't think this is a specifically Irish problem. In fact I think philosophy is a little more discussed in Southern Ireland campuses and after, judging by comments from Dublin friends, than it is over here.

Yes, the continental tradition is now wholly severed from Anglophone empiricism. Poets don't often go to Russell or Wittgenstein. But some go to Heidegger, and more used to go to Sartre who - like Heidegger -was influenced by Husserl. The point is that Nietzsche was writing a poetic language that anyone could find assimilable, even though they weren't trained philosophers. Even the Nazis could pervert him. They couldn't pervert Heidegger - too impenetrable - and could never have entered his world unaided. So he obliged by perverting himself.

I'm reading Isiah Berlin at the moment (The Power of Ideas), shorter essays; and proceeding to his pluralist philosophers Vico (1688-1744), Herder, and his teacher Hamann. All these philosophers pointed out incredibly early that there might be some absolute values, but each culture had different ones, different emphasizes, and Vico predicted cycles of such cultural systems, even within one particular one. Berlin with all of these three writers makes the distinction between relativism (the Marabar caves echo, 'everything exists, nothing has value', in effect) and pluralism, which does allow for differing values and a different emphasis on a kind of values menu; but not the value-free relativist position. Berlin also attacks the ideal state. For instance absolute liberty cannot co-exist (wolf eats lamb) with absolute equality. This, and the false determinism argued by Marxists, Fascists et al who still want us to struggle to the death for something they feel 'inevitable', are some of Berlin 's targets.

Another Berlin book on Philosophers of the Enlightenment - an argued anthology with commentaries and sadly out of print - superb - led me to Hume's refutation of causality. We can't be sure the sun will rise tomorrow; not absolutely. Well, you know all this. It changed philosophy and we still all proceed from Hume's breakthrough in the 1730s. Later on of course his commentaries on religion exerted a similar liberation.

I then got a lecture from Charles Lind on how Hume tackled this further, and how it now impacts on all Anglophone philosophy. Kant, basically, then went further: we are at the centre of our sense data, like a Copernican sun - Kant likened his breakthrough to putting a person's head at the centre of things. I am a sun etc. I wonder if this led us back to medieval systems and hypothetical 'forms', but apparently Kant's 'forms' are simply those articulating mental architecture. For the first time, apparently. OK, so Kant isn't guilty.

Charles's work has - you can guess this next bit - been in Artificial Intelligence, but he feels logic, which is how our home-grown philosophy has developed, is at a dead end. All this suggests a difficult PR job for philosophy. Russell eventually dismissed the later Whitehead (his own mentor, and collaborator in Principia Mathematica, 1913) in Whitehead’s Adventures in Ideas. A pity, since Whitehead, alas no stylist like Russell, was heading into more interesting territory. I’d forgotten too that Wittgenstein took so much from Lichtenstein from the later 18th century in his aphoristic late style. There's a huge a mount to learn. But it's the continental philosophers who offer most, and their contemporary language is more opaque. So much depends on a lucid, or suggestively poetic style like Nietzsche’s - or an opaque travesty like some of Heidegger’s (but he's good on applied philosophical elements like poetry).

Cheers, Simon






--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Robert Jenner [mailto:robert_jenner_2005@yahoo.co.uk]
Sent: 26 March 2008 21:19
To: Simon Jenner
Subject: Re: Jenner AWOL



Hello, yes I've been active on many fronts but perhaps not on the interactive one. Criticism is quite a different form from poetry writing and maybe you carry over some of the required ideas and forms from the former. Many poets can't write disciplined critical prose but can be nevertheless interesting.

People in Ireland fail to write well because of the overwhelming influence of Yeats, the condensation, intensity, sometime savagery of his work is beyond anyone there. Its not possible in an environment where the only choice is between a TV meal or a jaunt to get a takeaway. I mean, real poetry comes from real anger, bitterness and especially disillusionment which is the key word when considering Yeats, who had such high ideas when young and then saw them ravaged by the inertia that was all around him. Luckily he spent some fruitful years in London .

He was also bright enough to come under the spell of German philosophy. Think of how many contemporary Irish writers talk about that? Maybe he was really very like Nietzsche, Hoelderlin because he was 'mad' and his madness sharpened his wits for he resided in a world of torpor and stasis. It was also good that he rejected Catholicism, because he was an Orangeman at the beginning and then an Occultist.

best wishes,

PM

interview with Michael Hofmann

Hi, can you tell me something about your German background? How important is that to your writing? Do you presently write in German? Do any German writers influence your work?

You presently live and work in America and the Anglo-Saxon world and the English language has been formative in influencing your writing. Of course there’s a strong Germanic strand in English too and I wondered if you felt there was some powerful, cogent and expressive element in German that has made it so influential? German is also an inflected language which perhaps connects it profoundly to the Medieval or Ancient worlds. I wondered if the inflected elements in German influenced your English and what you thought of the connection between the German language and the pattern of German historical development?

Has your recent sojourn in America changed your view of English, how do you feel about American culture? Many critics see America caught between backwardness, the parish of the mid-west and south (where you presently are teaching) and the relative cosmopolitanism of the east and west coasts. Do you agree with this overall assessment or do you see an America of multiple diversities? If so, can you tell me something about that diversity?

What American authors do you read, why and how do you feel about American writing at this time?

Ezra Pound said in Cantico del Sole:
The thought of what America would be like If the Classics had a wide circulation Troubles my sleep, The thought of what America, The thought of what America ...

Does it give you nightmares or should we welcome a wide circulation of Ovid or Virgil in the worst American slums? (perhaps there already is?)

Do you like hamburgers with ketchup and mayo or do you think they stink?

Lastly, another German to have settled in the US was the pioneer rocket scientist Werner von Braun. He once remarked that man knows only change and not extinction. As you gaze across the everglades or wherever you happen to be in Florida, does it occur to you that this means that mankind will end up in fire or ice, but perhaps it may be in the sludge? Is Iraq such a quagmire, are the Gates of Hell opened, is the Second Coming immediate and necessary or is this a historical blip? Or a sign of a longer lasting decline?

UNDERSEA WINDS ONE

Undersea Winds One: The Pound Paideuma Maelstrom

It is very warm in here
At this time of year.

I have read my Ezra Pound.
Pound is round. Eliot is square.

Pound went to Italy
Sought to make a packet.

Broadcast on Rome radio
Sum counterblasts.

Obviously about the Jews.
He was caged at Pisa.

Its fair enough but not for Pound
Whose round head rolls down

The street gathering pace
Before it snowballs into me.

Surprisingly enough surprised
To see the grimace Pound promoted.

A 9-5 job in a bank
Would've suited you much better.

Can't you see that?
'Fuck off ye twat!' he spat back.

As Pound's round head rolls
Into the hedge, along the garden grass

A little girl picks up his chin and thinks
I can flog this to the Carnegie Mellon Trust.

Granted grants but 'How much is this worth?'
Its a knackered old Pound luv, 'bout a fiver.

HOLDERLIN AND HEIDEGGER

Dear Simon, no I think Heidegger went along with the regime, but by 1944 he was sent to the Rhine dykes (to dig) and probably would have been shot. He had proven to be a traitor, or was unwilling to go along with what had become palpable madness. He's an interesting example of complicity and Hannah Arendt, his lover, writes about him (as she later wrote about Adolph Eichmann - die banalitat von Bosen - the banality of evil). Do you mean the difference between Anglo-Saxon logical-positivist philosophy and Continental philosophy? Continental philosophy is often applied since it makes no claims independently of its subject and cannot be studied of itself. There's psychoanalysis, Hermeneutics or existentialism (and Heidegger's funny form of existentialism calling Sartre's 'Being and Nothingness' dreck). Holderlin's a difficult writer, rather like Gerald Manley Hopkins, but there are two hurdles to straddle there: firstly Holderlin's obscure, complex German and then his wide knowledge of the Classics. Incredibly dense, many of Holderlin's poems were enscribed in the English Gardens along with Goethe's. (but I thought Heinrich Heine was the second most important German poet - or is this simply because he was Jewish?) I've tried to read Holderlin but its difficult to connect with his work, mind, life and times, they are so distant from us.

I'm presently reading the 'Regeneration' trilogy which loses moment after the first volume. Quite interesting since it was written from a point-of-view so removed from the harsh realities the novel's immersed in.

Do you ever read ordinary literature? Agatha Christie or Harold Robbins? Or do you listen to rock 'n pop? I'm listening to a lot of Bob Dylan's stuff presently, a constant source of inspiration, his brief ballad stories. His persona, or the personae he created, compel me, but not as much as those Pound created. Pound's pretentious, but he knows what he's talking about, 'ABC of Reading' proves that. I was inspired by his mind, he clearly had something to say although much of what he did has been overshadowed by his fascist links. (perhaps he liked to be the Devil's advocate or was too obstinate eventually to acknowledge that he was wrong, whatever. He did what he did out of legitimate aversion for some aspects of America, life and history and politics and all, or perhaps he sought notoriety. How else does on sell unreadable poetry?)

best wishes

Hi Paul,

I'm answering a flood of documents and finishing a review on Mario Petrucci, whose work I commend to you. Anyway after that pompous opening I'm glad my intuitions aobut Hitler's essentially Volk-Viennese prejudice proves true. A documentary on the failure of the German military was enlightening, too.

Essentially, the German military were paralysed. They had traditionally taken an oath of loyalty but also one to stay out of politics. That's understandable and mostly works well - as we know to our cost when the military don't stay out. Perhaps they held General Monk in 1660 as a shining example. So they initially saw little of the Nazi threat but that it secured a stronger military future. Then by 1933 they were overtaken by the incredibly adroit oath they had to swear to the Nazis. They were outmanouevred and many resented it. But their taditional mind-set and habits did all the out-manouvering the Nazis could hope for. Their greed for a stronger military outweighed their scruples till it was far too late. But they weren't curious enough. Had they opposed, the Nazis would have collapsed, riven with the SA/SS split as they were.

Ill in bed read early unrevised Spender - replete with his Frankfurt experiences and the rise of Nazism -and Hopkins (Wreck etc) in alternation as Sonja was mourning a fallen tree outside. Showed her the two Hopkins poems and then read throughout. Spender is a truer poret in some ways than Auden, also a bad reviser, and MacNeice in some ways. Clumsy, but authentic and occasionally thrilling. Alinguistic confusion is often mroe than that, suggestive and suddenly lucid, turning insights of great power. It's a great pity we only usually see the tamed 1930s and the dying fall thereafter. He edited out his own reputation to some degree, and of course outlived himself till his last phase, which I'll read.

Just bought Heidegger on Holderlin too. I've dipped into this but as you'd imagine, only just. His other work on poets is out of print but City Books are scouring second-hand for that and Merleau-Ponty's Sense and Non-Sense which addresses Cezanne. The point being that often philosophers of this kind, that is, not inductive but continental ones, are often best when applied, not pure. Heildegger as Martin called him, posed interesting questions but had dishonourable answers. His criticism is more interesting. a repellant man, he persecuted happily from 1933 onwards.

All the Best,

Simon

ABC OF READING

Hi Simon, the first thing Hitler did in Berlin to the city was to move the statues of Bismarck, Roon, Moltke and the Siegsaule. These monuments are commerate Prussian militarism, obviously. So H wanted to distance himself from these, yet kept the monuments in Berlin as well. Essentially his time in power marks a break from traditional Prussian conservative militarism, obviously.

Yesterday I re-read ABC of Reading by Ezra Pound, a very interesting book. Yes, Pound knows a deal about language. The great break between the ancient world and the inflected languages of Greece and Rome, and the modern world, the rise of uninflected languages. The exception to this is German, which is still highly inflected, the Germans consciously harkened back to Rome and Greece, especially in the 19th century, but also in the iconography of Nazism with its eagles and monumentalism. Nazism is obviously nostalgic for an idealised political ordering in which plebians and patricians are strongly delineated and there is little or no mercantile class (Jews). But the ideal is far from the reality. Of course we could talk all day about this.

But Pound's book is interesting, I recommend it. Also flicked through a photo-book depicting Pound's last visit to Italy. He stopped off at Zurich on the way, noting James Joyce and Nora's gravestone at the Fluntern cemetery. It was overgrown with weeds, while other graves were decorated with the usual. The book is overly indulgent, weird photos of Pound, densely lit close-ups. I felt like getting a biro out and drawing a toothbrush moustache on him, as well as a swastika armband. That's the kind of thing we did at school, and I'd presently be wary or chary of defacing any book.

(by the way your not chary your terrified. I mean, the reason you don't speak out. Your terrified. Only conservative types detest the internet, because it means their views might be contradicted or that people, like me, will just use it to do anarchic scrawls. For me its the ultimate graffiti, where everything is permissable. Your position can only be rationalised in terms of fear but its an irrational fear, a running away from freedom.)



best wishes,

HARRIET MONROE

Hi, there's a very good poetry magazine in Chicago called Poetry, edited by Harriet Monroe. about 1912 she published T S Eliot, Ezra Pound and many others. Its still going today. I just wrote to them to ask them if they would consider an electronic submission. Also I know someone who works at the university. But its a big city, third biggest US city after NYC and LA. I've got many contacts in the US, many little publishers there have taken my work, in NYC, but also in Texas and California.
Did you see the Bob Dylan biopic 'I'm not there' or doesnt it interest you? Of course Dylan's a reminder of an age less plastic than our own, a time when people wrote their own music and played their own instruments. I'm sure the musical powers that be won't want to be reminded of him. After all, then folks might begin to reject the plastic synth music that surrounds them.

best wishes

CINNAMON PRESS

Hi, went to Cinnamon Press launch last night in Hoxton. Nothing exceptional, poetess with pretty ordinary ideas, pretty ordinary book, but seemed to sell herself, the book as an exceptional package. It wasnt. The unbelievable gratitude of the poetess towards the publishers (bouquet of flowers) lies in stark contrast to the behaviour of this author towards his, but then they didnt commit genocide. Reading was in a church, a conflation of poetry with religion which I reject, seeing poetry as an essentially irreligious rite, utterly satanic, and much to do with booze 'n fags. That's why I'm presently so alone, because most of my poetry friends are presently dead. Thought at first it was a Hawksmoor, St John the Baptist (what else?!?), Hoxton, which would have been doubly ironic and looking out for a pentacle star, bloodied goats head, pre-pubescent virgins sacrificed replete with cock (no euphemism). They were all sitting telling me how bleeding holy they all were, holy, holy, frigging holy. The ceiling was done in starkly neo-Raphaelite figurines riding out of Heaven but probably Hell, angels, knights, the rest. I sat with a glass of wine in my hand, intoning the Murphy prayer (please let me go down the pub...), the vicar appeared, showering me with Holy water. And a very good thing too. Bought a copy of Roger Elkin's latest offering, actually not very good writing, but then neither is Envoi any longer any good. I think Jan Fortune Wood will make it seriously dull, middle England and soon Envoi will be a church not a magazine or part of the C of E.

Dull.

best wishes,

Paul