source data about A Duncan's poetry

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 ...

compositions 1977-8 In a German Hotel 1980-81 Threads of Iron 1983-88 Skeleton looking at Chinese Pictures 1987-92 Alien Skies 1987-92 Surveillance and Compliance (final version actually 2004) 1981-90 Sound Surface 1996-2000 Pauper Estate 2000 Weapons Form with Music 1999- 2003 The Imaginary in Geometry (originally Symbolic Machines) 1999- 2005 Savage Survivals (amid modern suavity) pause. 2017-20 With Feathers on Glass 2017- The Gables of Erding The new poetry is split into two books, so ‘Feathers on Glass’ and ‘Erding’. Erding is mainly "Cold River", a long poem. It was published as "On the margins of great housing estates" 2023 composed “B movie: serial of seven stars”, which is due to be published by Equipage in 2024. 2024 composition of a new book, currently called "From the depths of the 20th century". or maybe "From late luxury to the patholithic"continuing into 2025. Publications 1978 In a German Hotel (in OCHRE magazi...

comments on my own poems 3 (Savage Survivals) 1 Schemas for poems 2 ​ 3 This post contains comments on 'Savage Survivals' and 'Alien Skies'. 4 ​ 5 Poems from SAVAGE SURVIVALS 6 The “schema” for the book was to avoid autobiography (again), otherwise it was just to be frivolous in comparison with “The Imaginary in Geometry”. The title comes from an already existing book, I believe one produced by the Rationalist Association in about the 1930s. I liked the phrase without wanting it to mean very much. 7 ​ 8 Acoustic Shock 9 A harbour at West Bay in Dorset destroyed by a storm circa 1964. the soft wrapping of the tender membranes is a quote from the ‘Chaldaean Oracles”, where the throat of someone gives an oracle, aulos meaning ‘flute’. Qualmwasser water pushed at high pressure through cracks in a dam, in a description of a dam that I read. The holes in the earthen dam were made by a kind of mouse. frame capture : the process is dynamic but if you look at it frame by...

commentary on my own poems (2) 1 Schemas 2 Notes on my own poems to help in case of doubt. 3 4 poems from 'The Imaginary in Geometry' 5 6 “Jerusalem” CR Ashbee, the arts and crafts theorist, was town planner for Jerusalem in the early days of the League of Nations Mandate. to the mullions in the scatter of stone golden cubes : Ashbee took artisans from the East End of London to a new life in the Cotswolds. with the ripple of hammer-pats to say “hand-made” : the hand-made goods were expensive but held to contain virtue; manufacturers mass-produced the goods from moulds that imitated the marks of hand-made items, thus breaking the business in Chipping Camden. 7 Cotton Suq: cotton market 8 9 10 “Wonders of Classification” The poem has a “double scheme”, about the collections which were the prehistory of museums, and about the acquisition of a body. I was thinking about the idea of “collections”. 11 The poem starts with the “object pouch” of an American Indian “medicine ...

On the Margins of Great Empires. Selected Poems Andrew Duncan Published in June 2018 by Shearsman Books Beneath are some responses to the component parts from which this selected is drawn, from 1978 onwards. Seeing this sequence as a large, articulated work, put into its sections and with the culminations of a sustained amplitude, I esteem its achievement very highly. It is strong and active with the questions of power which underlie the strength; the instrumentalism of language is put under sustained pressure, both of invention and expression, and the outcome is negotiated closely across a wide range of historical predicament and moral passion. The method is conspicuously unoriginal, but its uses are strikingly productive and grand. […] This clash generates in itself an experience for the reader of strength which is profoundly not power. It comes from a precarious equilibrium-point, not willed and in itself formal rather than psychological or dramatic, at which the limits bo...

Schemas This is meant as a reference source for people reading my poems, in case of difficulty. The poems are meant to be complete without them. I am setting out from the assumption that the poems up to ‘Alien Skies’ do not need a commentary. I thought it would be helpful to critics, translators, or interviewers to confirm some suppositions. Poems from ‘Selected poems’ from poems of 1991-6: At Cumae Transparent Radiation The ‘radiation’ is sunlight. The title comes from a song by 60s psychedelic band The Red Krayola, as covered by the Spacemen Three. For C. Wind and Wear at Aix en Provence Triumph and Martyrdom of Sergei Korolev Korolev was a rocket designer who was in a prison camp for a while before rising, eventually, to be the chief designer for the Soviet space programme. The poem shows him in the camp dreaming of being free and an engineer, and has an alternative story where he never leaves the camp at all. Chronique mondaine of the Sixth Poetry Conference in a Regi...