A fine can of worms you're opening here, Peter, although it's true
enough that behind this discussion lies the dichotomy of text-as-
expression-of-self & text-as-text-full-stop (a position you've often
distanced yourself from, unless I've misunderstood you). Narrowing it
back, though, everybody knows that Bloodaxe is the leading mugshot
publisher of our time & has traded on that from its inception. If one
objects to that then the obvious course is not to be published by
Bloodaxe. To substitute a picture of (if I understand it - Bloodaxe
never send me catalogues) one's trademark black velvet jacket for one's
Bloodaxe passport photo seems to me simply playing the game but by
personal rules which create a carefully crafted self-image which is
every bit as posed as a full frontal. It doesn't stop me admiring the
Black Velvet Jacket's writings, of course not; but I don't think he
deserves extra admiration for winding the self-projection up in this
way. Best, Alan
In message <v01530501b6381b709122@[194.112.54.169]>, Peter Riley
<[log in to unmask]> writes
>>>Against the tide of what? Of people who don't mind having their
>photographs taken.
>
>No, no, m'dear, against the implicit belief that poetry is a projection of
>self, which dominates the entire industry. These things mean things---the
>festival circuits, reviews, mag features, blurbs, the poems themselves, the
>covers, the wrapping, mugshots in catalogues... all contribute to a
>currently massively upheld unstated belief that poetry is an expression
>of personality, offering a substitute self which the reader can directly
>inhabit by empathy. Tying the whole world to this, casting the whole
>extent of the globe and its problems aside in favour an enclosive
>constructed world centred on personal confirmation. Most "political
>correctness" is just another version of this. Some people take it very
>seriously. Jack Spicer is said by some to have fallen into a despair which
>led to his death because he so hated this ethic and couldn't escape from it
>in the poetic context he inhabited.
>
>Look for instance at the way Bloodaxe publicises MacSweeney, hardly as a
>poet at all, but as an alcoholic, now a dead alcoholic, offering us the
>vicarious thrill of "being" that life through the poetry without any of the
>immense attached risks. (His death by alcoholism gets into the very small
>blurb on him in the new catalogue; Doug Oliver's death doesn't -- nothing
>so sellable, I suppose, about cancer.)
>
>Actually I don't agree with [whatsisname] at all, I think that when the
>reader actually gets to the poetry it asserts its own ethics whatever
>fantasy commercials you have to pass through in the process. Evidently
>[thingy] feels he can't trust his readers.
>
>
>/PR
>
>
--
Alan Halsey
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|