Surely the question of authors' photographs isn't _just_ two-sided
(projection of self versus high impersonality). I can think of two examples
of publishers committed to poetry-that-questions-the-projection-of-self
who still aren't afraid to show their faces, and the faces of others. The
Barque website (which for those who haven't been to www.barquepress.com is
lovely and bedecked) is one example: John Tranter's Jacket is another. In
both cases, happily, they can speak for themselves on this list. As far as
this reader is concerned tho', once you have a poetry which has bothered to
step beyond the bounds of that domineering projected self, surely an image
of the author can be _re-admitted_ as some kind of comment, however ironic,
on production. It's not as if the stuff really did fall out of the sky, and
relations between authorial image and the work can invite imaginative, open
responses as well as (and preferably instead of) reductive ones. In this
context, the now infamous velvet jacket isn't so much a rejection of
self-projection as a playful acknowledgement and a recognition that such
projections are contrived, just not necessarily in a bad way.

Malcolm

>Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 12:34:13 GMT
>From: [log in to unmask] (Peter Riley)
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Bludaxe
>Message-Id: <v01530501b6381b709122@[194.112.54.169]>
>
>>>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
>
>
>
>
>------------------------------

> > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > >

The reader cannot help feeling that the poem is pretending to talk about
waffles but is really talking about oblivion - Michael Riffaterre




%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%