I share your fears. Just want to beat the poor dead horse one more time:
"But the 
politics surrounding poetry is tangential, surely, to the making of
poetry?" Absolutely. It's anything but tangential to the distribution of
poetry, however. Small presses like my own, Junction, can try to pick up
the slack, but we none of us have the clout of Faber or Norton for making
the books readily available.

Here's the way it's done in Cuba, whose poetry publishing I've become
intimate with. Crude censorship used to be common but has all but
disappeared, but self-censorship is almost universal, and when times are
tough a poem about Che or for El Jefe's birthday, penned with whatever
degree of enthusiasm, never hurts. All publishing is at state expense. Even
some dissidents are published, but their books tend not to be reviewed and
are less well-distributed.  


At 10:11 AM 8/8/2000 +1000, you wrote:
>David wrote:
>
>>From my point of view the
>>Spat was much to do with the Common-wealth, that is to say being another
>>policeman's-report-worthy of an incident in the Great Unresolved that has
>>been arrested in our culture since the 17th Century
>
>Well  it depends from what angle you define it.  Since the common wealth 
>of literature isn't "owned", although there are many bids to make it seem 
>so, it's there for anyone to read, say, mangle, distort and recreate as 
>they wish: and so they do, in the margins and the shadows if they have 
>to.  It would be a shame to ignore the huge explosions of energy which 
>have occurred in English poetry since the 17th century, which may well 
>have happened in _spite_ of all that: despite it, to spite it, whatever - 
>I am perfectly willing to admit that England is a particular case, with 
>its own peculiarities, especially the peculiarities of "class". But the 
>politics surrounding poetry is tangential, surely, to the making of 
>poetry?  God, I hope so - to think it is central is, to me, like looking 
>into hell.  Fuck that, it is the imprisonment you describe... 
>
>Having an interesting problem myself, kind of linked with this, which 
>just this morning is making me a little nauseous.  In a moment of misled 
>politeness I agreed to participate in an Australia Council "vision day", 
>in which supposedly people get together and discuss strategies for the 
>future of Australian arts.   (Make of my invitation what you will.  
>Perhaps, like Steve Berkoff, I _am_ the fucking establishment; if I am, 
>then what should I do with my peculiar feeling of disempowerment, which I 
>have to continually battle in order to write anything at all?  And it's 
>not just personal...)
>
>I received the briefing material an hour ago.  It is all supported with 
>expensively designed pamphlets on the arts in Australia, extensive 
>analyses from the Bureau of Statistics on how much artists earn, how how 
>is spent on "the arts", etc etc.  The brief is apparently to work out how 
>to make literature "sustainable" in Australia in the next ten years.   
>Sustainable means providing an economic or social (not "cultural") good. 
>The most common form of writing, apparently, is writing newsletters.
>
>Nowhere is there anything except quantifying analyses of what writing is: 
>how many books are published, how many people are buying them, what 
>proportion of the income is spent, etc etc etc, apart from a flag from 
>the Australia Council flying the words "contemporary" and "high quality", 
>which in this context seems like so much decoration, the necessary 
>rhetoric.  The word innovation is thrown in frequently, but it seems 
>almost always to be linked with the word technology.  There is no sense 
>that ideas, of any kind, have anything to do with writing, or of any 
>sense of intellectual discourse: those are, in these terms, wholly 
>non-existent.  Writing is a product, like everything else (fridges, 
>mobile phones, cheap Chinese imports), and _it is solely defined as a 
>product_.  A success is something which is consumed by the largest 
>possible number of consumers, and hopefully "educates" them about 
>something along the way.   And yet, these terms are supposed to "map" the 
>"future strategies" of writing in Australia.
>
>It is of course the initiative of a Marketing Strategist.
>
>I will of course go along and make my noises about how inapplicable this 
>is to what I think writing is and why there might be other ways of 
>constructing thinking about it; and it will not make a blind bit of 
>difference.  The terms are already set, and so therefore is the 
>conclusion: and I find this more frightening than the concerns aired on 
>this list, despite the deep hurts they betray.  This blank corporate face 
>is the real Beast, and it's already devouring the culture here, which is 
>too young to resist (we are a small country).  When a major inquiry into 
>Australian theatre was mounted a couple of years ago, the appointees were 
>six bankers.  Presumably they would have the "disinterest" to make the 
>correct recommendations to the government.  The idea of appointing a 
>practitioner - as Britain did when it appointed Sir Richard Eyre to 
>investigate the Opera House - is so completely off the agenda as to seem 
>ridiculous.  
>
>Sorry if this is all very boring, but I had to vent my spleen.  This is 
>the surrounding and dominant cultural ideology here, and it sucks: and if 
>I operate under the assumption that _any_ kind of serious literature is a 
>threatened species, that is why.  Argue all you like: you can buy Other 
>and A Various Art and Firebox, and discuss them seriously, and disagree 
>vehemently, and seek to pull down/invade/replace ivory towers, or put 
>bombs underneath them, because it all matters so very much.  That seems 
>like health to me.
>
>Blackly yours
>
>Alison
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