source data about A Duncan's poetry

More reviews Someone might be interested to see the history of reviewing, and like the rest of this website this is offered for somebody with that curiosity. In 1978 I published a book of poems about life as a gastarbeiter, in a magazine called Ochre. One of the editors forwarded me an extract from a letter (30/3/79) from Lee Harwood: "I was immensely moved by the work, more moved by a poem than I have been for ages. It's all quite stunning - to read work which comes out of such a real necessity (Olson's old insistence, and more), and in which it's as though the writer's whole life is laid out there, but laid out not as mere autobiography, personal catharsis, but as a force that also affects others. A work of art in the best sense of that phrase. And such a great and deep pleasure and excitement to read a text that's talking about something that really matters, something that has this firm human base." Yes, well, it was all downhill from there. Thanks, L...

Unprinted interview stuff In about 2005 I did two really good interviews with Adam Fieled and with someone whose name I never gathered (for Signals magazine). Recently, I looked at the on-line versions and realised that there is material which got edited out. Space is free on a site like this, so I thought to use this material. For some reason I didn’t store the emails, so these replies are a bit fragmentary and I lost the questions. Q2 (question was something like “why do you write such sad poems”) I find this hard to explain. I once read an interview with a guy from Radiohead, the rock band, where he said that they'd been told they would never get anywhere playing sad songs on a concert stage, and he laughed because he knew they were wrong. I have a radio tape of Radiohead playing at the Reading Festival, some year, the singer announces "The Bends", this unbearably tense, howling, angst-drenched, song, and this huge cheer goes up. I knew that melancholic poems co...

These are text for book jackets, aimed at the retail situation. Because of their purpose, they may be optimistic rather than accurate. But they may be evocative of a certain moment. They document something... even if not reality. The Imaginary in Geometry: The instruction for this new volume was to write poems with no autobiographical content – going straight to personal myth. The Imaginary in Geometry is named for a book by a legendary Russian priest and mathematician martyred by the Bolsheviks. It means that any theory involves idealisation – but also how something imaginary takes on shape and dimensions in the artistic act. Breton wanted to change Malraux's definition of modern art, as what develops a series of images into a personal myth, into the discovery of a collective stock of images, rooted in the unconscious. Such a return of archaic worlds to light would have to pick its way through the debris of myths wished on us by the agencies – Anglophilia, a Romance of the Do...

How I wrote some of my books recalled 2021 I seem to have written some of this down before, but I can’t locate it. I have incorporated texts from the jackets of various books. This deals with my early books. Early days At my school, there was a remedial class in the 6th form for scientists, who were perceived as being weak in use of English. I was in it because I was a linguist. The teacher was Neil Curry, a poet, and he taught us poetry. He used MacBeth's poetry 1900 to 1965 (? title). This was a breakthrough for me. We did ‘The Waste Land’, and I especially liked that. So this was from September 1972 on, going on until maybe April 1973, when classes stop to allow for A-level revision. Neil was an inspiring teacher and he actually understood modern poetry. So at some point early in 1973 I decided that writing poetry was for me. I wanted to write like Eliot or David Jones, which is the last thing that a 17 year old is going to bring off! So I was looking for a way of writing m...

Andrew Duncan interview, conducted by Norbert Lange, April 2011 I want to say first that one of very few books I have here is one in Old Irish called ‘Acallamh na senorach’, a 12th century work whose title means ‘Dialogue of the Elders’. But in modern Gaelic the word for ‘interview’ is also ‘acallamh’. INTERVIEW ANSWERS Q1    [compare German and British scene] How would you compare british and german poetry? I guess the groups and differences are in each country manifold. But I believe there are links in between? Perhaps a Strömung./ undercurrent, in both mainstream and what used to be called “experimentell”? A1. The basic factor is the large number of poets writing and the diversity of the scene. This limits the scope of any generalisations. We are on a sort of beach which has hundreds of niches. This landscape is very new and its rules are perhaps unclear. For example, do you start by saying “I will avoid all the occupied niches and find an unoccupied one”? I think the poets ...