Dear Keston and eavedroppers,

I'm not going to come out in those terms because I don't trust them. I'd
also be out of my depth (though I believe in being out of ones depth, a
necessary exercise, but it wastes other people's time). But above all I
increasingly believe in the need to keep the understanding of poetry clear
of the specialised vocabularies of speculative intellectual discourses.

There is a  run-down of the history of the word Ideology, and a rather less
thorough one of Private, in Raymond Williams' useful book Keywords (1976).
I wasn't using Ideology in Napoleon's romantic sense. The classic sense is
of a bringing to consciousness of, or the conscious *and organised* form
of, explanatory beliefs and thoughts which further a social or political
(or larger) movement. As I see it, it is built into this definition and the
history of its usage that it is not only a descriptive term, but also a
prescriptive. It entails a programme.

I can also be forgiven for involving a loose modern cultural sense which
relates it to the yoking of human acts including artistic ones to a social
overview which prioritises the power structure.

In that case a denial of the ideological reading of free acts such as
poetry, certainly does not amount to the construction of an opposing
ideology. Objection to a programmed response is not evidence of an
alternative programme. That would be like the old Freudianist trick whereby
any doubt about the validity of the psychoanalytic dogma is interpreted as
a resistance motived by repression, and we have a cure for that. So the
terms aren't allowed to move out of their ideological niche.

The word Private long ago shed its necessary contradistinction from Public
and its connection with Privilege, and among its many modern meanings it is
most strongly drawn towards Personal, in which perfectly common usage I
have every right to use it, and to ignore its complex and confused history.
Writing more richly, I would have used the world heart .

So to say then---

1) Of course there is a private, pre-linguistic condition. If there weren't
it would be impossible for memory to operate.  Everybody knows that they
carry with them psychic receptivities and refusals, lights and darknesses
resulting from experience which condition response and understanding.
Nothing else can explain the very difference which I set out to indicate.
The cultural presence in this theatre is obviously real but not necessarily
central. This privacy has nothing whatsoever to do with property.   If you
say that the percept is instantly a public script,  then difference must
result from error, and be correctable, and even punishable.  But difference
is inalienable.

To talk of "zones" "arenas" "theatres" or "landscapes" is of course
metaphorical because what they are is actions, of the mind, forming
relations from time. These relations are not a priori social, but are
equally events of solitude.  It isn't in this zone that cultural acts echo
in ignorance the ethos of their age, but in extension from it. But I never
used the words essense or essential, I shun such judgements.

I say that poetry is read into that capacity of the self, and renders its
fruits  shareable by echoing difference into the structure.  It is a
making-public of total process in a trust of recognition and as a quest for
common space.   This is perfectly in accordance with a belief that "the
relations of people to each other are necessarily of great importance...
and are .. constituted by acts of imaginative literary praxis." (except
there is obviously a hell of a lot more than literary praxis in the
constitution of the human interface. In that case if you were illiterate
you wouldn't exist as a person among people.)   What is the use of such a
belief if it doesn't seek a pact with difference, if it doesn't believe in
an enharmonic potency as a force of good?

And so I have to ask what follows, you'll have to forgive this-----  which
is, How is it that, evidently, various of those who believe in the
absolutely public constitution of experience, in the primacy of constituted
relation, are led within that to insist on a "poetry" which  refuses acts
of human connection through language?  Which ruthlessly banishes all the
public, articulating process of comprehension in favour of a violence of
misfitting?  (I'm not talking about your poetry, Keston, nor experimental
poetry in general, but about a  poetical tendency which I believe you would
support). How does that elegant sentence about the relations of people fit
with a poetry which withdraws itself as far as it possibly can from
recognition, and which cannot by its nature participate in any public
relationship  because, well, to put it as elegantly as I can, nobody can
make head or tail of it?   What is the constitutive power in human affairs
of a poetry which speaks only to itself, like the wise man in the desert?


Late Junction is about tostart (though I despair of it), I quit the rest,
--- it can be taken as read--  (Of course there is a distinct self
everybody bases all their acts on the assumption that there is)  (Of course
you can indeed must work towards objectivity do you think we are just
handed it on a plate?  )   (How can a position be esoteric when it is based
on common sense?) (No one proposes inclination as method: inclination is
where we are, it is the question,  which the short cut to discourse avoids)
(We always need to make a start -- stop sounding fin de siècle, you'll be
telling us next the world has become terribly complicated recently and
poetry has to echo this....)

And what I said was, it's no use discussing IF people won't seek to
transcend the private, which they can't do if they don't acknowledge it.
.To open reading to the private, and not let false consciousness hold it at
bay. Quite simply and categorically: read the poem as addressed personally
to you, as something liable to change your life, or have nothing to do with
it.  I think Sir Philip Sidney (for whom Ezra Pound had no time at all)
said something quite similar.

Yours admiringly,


Peter



Now this class has four teachers! we shall really have to behave ourselves.
It's great to have Mr Caddell sitting at his desk with the rest of the
boys and girls.




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