I find this "history" a rather sad affair. It seems to be a way of talking
about a failure as if it were a success. No point in elaborating on
that, I guess.
And the way that Poetry Society fiasco is being talked about, the guerilla
stance: coup and counter-coup. Has anyone considered what alternatives
the Arts Council had under the circumstances, given what their job was and
the duty they owed to the Society? I don't excuse them, but if you take
over a society of so-many thousand paying and voting members and run it as
concerning something which interests almost none of them, you're in, I'd
say, for trouble. Sooner or later.
The commitee which ran the Poetry Soc during that episode was not entirely
united. I am sympathetic to views I have heard expressed by persons both
involved and spectatorial, that that committee fed its own defeat. That if
it had acted more responsibly, if it had shown some awareness of the danger
it was in and exercised some diplomacy and sagacity towards the threat,
that brutal termination could have been avoided. It might have been
possible to come to terms with the opposition and in some way maintain a
presence, which might have produced a more varied and useful PoetSoc than
the one we have had since then, which is only now, after all these years,
beginning to have some awareness forced upon it of the ranges of poetry
operating in this place. And how much more valuable this would have been
than the retreat into impotent defiance.
Which is so much still the tone of things, it seems.
/PR
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