tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638619958588096610.post4115570898315769167..comments2023-11-22T09:11:01.567+00:00Comments on George Szirtes: The Austerities of Sam Riviere 1: Space and TimeGeorge Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08889600788146987089noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638619958588096610.post-81626917859551442782011-09-09T20:09:39.653+01:002011-09-09T20:09:39.653+01:00Thank you, George. I'm panther, by the way, no...Thank you, George. I'm panther, by the way, not sure why I came up as Anon. Not that I have anything against Anon.panthernoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638619958588096610.post-83082455309884019732011-09-09T15:12:31.862+01:002011-09-09T15:12:31.862+01:00Yes, perhaps one is born a certain way, as a histo...Yes, perhaps one is born a certain way, as a history person. When I want to be curmudgeonly about this I tell myself the young have nothing to write about. Nothing beyond the personal has happened to them - and everything they have witnessed has come to them filtered through the technologies of our time, technologies that people like Baudrillard regard as constituting another reality - the computer game of the first Iraq War for instance (the one about the occupation of Kuwait). But this is the part I want to explore next.<br /><br />Before the Berlin War there was Vietnam and Prague 1968. Before that it was the Seven Day War, before that the Cuba crisis, before that Budapest and Suez which is as far as I go back as a child, though my life was clearly conditioned by what had happened before - the War and the Shoah, the fascist Thirties, the break-up of Hungary, and all those Biedermaier buildings of Budapest that signal the Habsburg era.<br /><br />No doubt some of this will enter into the second post tonight. In the meanwhile, thank you for writing and my best wishes for those history poems.George Shttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08889600788146987089noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638619958588096610.post-53493422231800895042011-09-09T08:29:46.494+01:002011-09-09T08:29:46.494+01:00It might be a generational thing, George, I don...It might be a generational thing, George, I don't know.I also feel it's a personality thing, though. I too am a history poet. Am in my mid-forties. Does this make a difference ? I know a lot of people round about my age and even older are not history poets at all.<br /><br /> I'm a history poet because I'm a history person, I suppose. Not a professional historian in the sense of writing books about Napoleon, or the rise of the working-classes in the nineteenth century. But still, a history person, sensing how these things and much else press in on us.<br /><br /> Defining image for my generation : the Berlin Wall coming down. I was 22, and a newly-graduated modern language graduate. perhaps that's what makes the difference. That I've spent quite alot of time in Eastern Europe, travelling, teaching, living (and writing) certainly makes a very big difference. But it didn't MAKE me a history person ; that was there already.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com