From time to time, I don't know why, I get an e-mail from Agenda. I must have clicked something somewhere once that generated them and I don't mind. But it is surely far too highbrow and serious in its approach for me, who only finds myself countersigning letters to comics like the TLS.
It's interesting to see which profoundly important writers that you've never heard of are being featured or interviewed. There is a terrifyingly narrow world out there somewhere in which great reputations are made without their names ever being mentioned outside of a handful of magazines. And, why not.
But the latest issue says it debates, ‘Can you teach Creative Writing, especially Poetry?’
And I've asked that question myself in that rhetorical way that expects the answer 'no'.
I once met a friend of a friend who was an art teacher and asked him if he could teach me to draw, because I can't, and he said he could.
I didn't believe him but later wondered what would be the point, even if he succeeded.
The same applies to poetry, as it would to football.
I don't know whether to get myself a copy of the latest issue of Agenda and see what they have to say or whether I'd be better off sticking with what I think.
David Green
- David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I published booklets of my own poems. The original allocation of ISBN numbers is used up now, though. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become, often more about music than books and not so often about poems. It will be about whatever suggests itself.
