REALITY CHECK (A CAVEAT)

Okay, beefore I get carried away thinking all is rosy in da garden of poeetry Ireland let me admit that I hadn't read the hole yoke and I hadn't got to page 72 where d'auld dinosaur rears it's ugly head again with a review of Eilean Ni Chuilleanain's selected poems that would make an art critic sound like a straight talker. This review by Kitt Fryatt is pretentiously hi-flown to the nth degree and is demonstrative of where poetry and it's effete world goes hideously wrong. An intellectual apartheid where poetry is wrestled from the unwashed masses( of which I am one) and put upon a pedestal, confined in an intellectual ivory tower for the supposed elite to frown and fawn upon. Real poetry Is almost always from the outsider looking in , once you lose that you lose truth. Let me quote you a bit to either illustrate this ,or to show i am completely wrong again as I have been many times in the past.This is what Kitt says. 'More sophisticated versions of this solution instruct poets to render any application of folk tradition relevent through psychological aptness, historical parallel, or poetic structure( I sometimes suspect that the broad highway to the 'project' is paved with poetic structure). The cruder of these injunctions accounts for the appeal of traditional material rather better than the supposedly subtler: the attraction of folklore is not its potential to make sense of our atavisms(which in any case is nearly nil) but the opportunity it offers to indulge them.Its uncanny impersonality is analgous to the deconstructionist notion that language, in Pual de man's words,'does things that are so radically out of control that they cannot be assimilated to the human at all.'It might well be better, ethnically speaking, to drown the myth -kitty than strain to accomodate it to an age of human rights.' Admittedly this is taken out of context , but buy PIR read it and tell me I'm wrong. The rest of the stuff is good, some of it is great, no publication is perfect and I think this Ed is still the Bizz.Looking forward to finishing this edition and look forward to da next , will even submit-hope the waiting times have improved as much as da content!