Beautiful Feelings - more, or hardcore strinxotica

am at the stage of supporting the publisher in getting permission for quotes – he does the work, luckily for me. He prepared a list of quoted poems which has 116 rows. Ouch! The logistics of this are just impossible. How did I come to be so extravagant.
I have checked all the quotes and found a whole row of small changes. The only really key thing is a word missing from a Nat Raha poem. I did check all the quotes, before, but I think there were lots of changes so I should have checked them all again.
We have worked out which quotes are long enough for us to need to seek permission, according to the guidelines. Far too many. I am at the point today of working out which authors are likely to be off the radar, so that I can cut down the quoted text and get us out out of my commitment. I don’t want to spend six months trying to track people down who are impossible to find and whose one-time publishers can't find them. There is a point here, which is that a quote is supposed to demonstrate something. If that is so, you can explain the same point in prose. If you don’t know what it is demonstrating, you haven't written the book. You need to think it through properly. I suppose the other point is that the poems belong to the poet, not you. If you make an intellectual point, the point belongs to you and you don’t have the problems attendant on using what belongs to someone else.

Exhausting as the proofing of quotes was, it did raise a couple of sparks. For example, Stephanie Sy-Quia and Melanie Challenger both quote the same word from Beowulf: mearc-stapas. Yes, we were all diligent students and we had to read magnificently ornate 7th C poems in the original. But it’s also noticeable that the word amnion appears in both poets: “took inside the forget me not blue/ of its mouth my whole arm/like baby-Moses returned to the amnion.” (Challenger)
Also, I had to re-read Cloud to find the quotes I had used. Since I first read it, I have read a lot about the Mayan text Popol Vuh. I started that because I knew Thom had used it in ‘Cloud’. So this time I realised how many themes Thom had drawn from this 16th C text (which is essentially pre-Columbian). If I were going to start again, I could give a much better account of this.

Exotica. Wayne Burrows wrote "the Exotica Suite", in prose but like poetry. now better data: "Stereophonic sound came to at least a select few living rooms of the mid-1950s. Stereo recording became widespread in the music business by the 3rd quarter of 1957"

- so exotica is linked to the 33 1/3 LP and not to stereo as such as I suggested. Stereo vinyl was not around until 1958 whereas Exotica had been big since 1952. I should have said that the arrival of the long-playing record and better audio quality made it possible. Of course stereo contributed to the popularity of music with so many unusual textures (and so little melodic impulse) after 1958. But many Exotica LPs had not originally been recorded and pressed in stereo. Audiophiles were listening to music on audio tape, in stereo, in 1954.
"Exotica is a musical genre, named after the 1957 Martin Denny album of the same name that was popular during the 1950s to mid-1960s with Americans who came of age during World War II. The term was coined by Simon "Si" Waronker, Liberty Records co-founder and board chairman." - but that Les Baxter theremin album is in 1947?

Two quotes about Exotica: "The musical colloquialism exotica means tropical ersatz, the non-native, pseudo experience of insular Oceania, Southeast Asia, Hawaii, the Amazon basin, the Andes, the Caribbean and tribal Africa. Denny described the musical style as "a combination of the South Pacific and the Orient...what a lot of people imagined the islands to be like...it's pure fantasy though." While the South Seas forms the core region, exotica reflects the "musical impressions" of every place from standard travel destinations to the mythical "shangri-las" dreamt of by armchair safari-ers."
"Ritual is the seminal exotica record, influencing all that came after it." (ritual of the savage, 1952 10" album (or 1951) by Les Baxter.) The sleeve also says "le sacre du sauvage" and the reference back to "le sacre du printemps" is obvious. I sank into a fan website which told me "Further exotification took place at later points thanks to the usual suspects Martin Denny and Arthur Lyman, but here this original lacks the paradisiac notion… while thankfully exuding and even eclipsing the middle class wanderlust of the 50‘s." and "Playful yet unexpectedly dark due to the ham-fisted dulcimer/harpsichord nucleus coated in maraca blots, this composition seamlessly connects to Busy Port in that the exotic is getting normalized and the faux-baroque West getting augmented by the unknown." (courtesy of ambientexotica.com) "The woodwinds and soft marimbas provide the teal-colored silkened jungle backdrop to the whirling flutes and iridescent drums." Damn! if only I could write like that! I believe the author is Bligh Kon-Tiki.
and on a more stringent site "Either way, the development of this gloriously camp and morally dubious genre offers a window into one of the strangest moments in American pop-cultural history."

Anyway, this is the unreal atmosphere which Burrows was trying to evoke. stringent exotica?
Writing about Sam Riviere, I quoted '“suffer from paralysing yet hyperactive mode of boredom” leading to “its central theme is billed as the economic downturn that has negatively affected so many, but your existence, funded as it is at the taxpayer’s expense, remains almost completely unaffected.” He describes the process in a flow chart.' I have been trying to remember where I got this from. Actually it was that anthology edited by George Szirtes and Helen Ivory, In their own words. I didn’t mention this in the bibliography because I felt that the bibliog was expanding and squeezing out the text. Riviere also says about 81 Austerities “if the success of the marketing methods you sought to parody compromises the value of the project as a cultural critique”. So this is a level of deep-pile ironies which I didn’t record. I have a feeling that collective memory will write down 81 Austerities as a documentary indictment of David Cameron’s austerity measures when the poet has explicitly said that it is nothing like that. “81” began life as a ‘tumblr blog’ where other people could leave comments (I think the comments at the back of the book are selected from those interjections?). I suspect that making a book out of an already successful blog is a "parody" of a "marketing strategy" used by numerous wannabe writers, where they establish via a web release that there is a market and then go to a publisher saying “look, I have done the market research for you”. (I am watching on amazon prime a Canadian TV series called ‘Sanctuary’ where the creator made non-professional film stories and used those to get a network TV corporation to invest.)
Riviere indicates that he had a pre-existing state of anxiety which inhibited him from writing poems, and which related to feelings of guilt about being funded while other people his age were being reduced to (economically) the civil dead, and that he released the anxiety by relating each poem to the occasion which made it speak, and the occasions involved Riviere being at least modestly affluent. Affluent but anxious. (I don’t set all this out in what I write.)

The book refers to 972 poets featuring in the Poetry Book Society suggestion lists over a five-year period. I did another spreadsheet of the quarters posted since I made that original list, and found another 460 names, so the new total is 1430. Interesting that the average over seven years is an additional 200 a year. I am not able to take in 200 new names in a year. That is one every two days, isn’t it. Of course most of the titles on their website have a write-up of some kind, you can compare my book to those and of course my claim is that my critical view is more valuable than the uncritical laudatory texts supplied by the publisher. Those might reflect the views of the poets about their own work, of course, which the publisher is likely to know about. Rupi Kaur’s website offers boxes of cards with the inscription “writing prompts self-esteem”, and this might explain why poets might not agree with my views and might not give me permission to quote.

The interesting thing about In their own words is that, while it was published by Salt and Salt had about 200 British poets, it only includes three Salt poets. So you could definitely write a book about the Salt poetry list, but this totally isn't it. It has 60 poets. Again, we conclude from the lack of overlap that the catchment area contains hundreds of names. So writing about it is a bold enterprise.