Dear Keston etc,

It doesn't seem to me, Keston, that you answer me. It seems that you do
this goat-dance around my letter, pecking at the terms (as if the terms
mattered) , knotting me up into contradiction as a result of the
implications of my vocabulary and works I haven't read by R. Williams...
(but I'm not working with implication, I'm working with evidence).

You neglect the central thread, and turn on this word "private" which I
never said was the site of the entire praxis; I mean it's a necessary
ground, like a testing-point, weighbridge of authenticity, it is how we
know that the construct has any coin at all.  You either write it from
there or you write it as an application to join something. Pre-linguistic,
I called it. (If there's one way of getting yourself into trouble in
academic zones these days it's using terms like "pre-linguistic"!)  And
"essential" meaning (as it usually means) indispensible.  No ontology
(despicable betting-shop) is in operation.

But you seem to feel this "privacy" is a naughty thing.  As if (and this is
important for a verbal art such as poetry)  privacy, privation and
privatisation were all implicated in each other and refer to one  class of
act. As if proper, property and appropriation amounted to the same thing.
I think this is a misunderstanding of the nature of etymological
connections. The earliest back you can take the word Private (to low Latin
privatus,I think?) it has at least three distinct meaning.

Indeed my plea for a private creative "space"  IS to do with possession,
but not of wealth. It is to do with possession of not-wealth. Are you
willing to concede that possession of wealth and possession of not-wealth
might be two very different things, which can express each other without
blurring their distinction?   The not-wealth in which we can be "rich" has
been expressed as a figure of wealth for centuries, and why not?  Or do you
just believe "money is bad for you"?  It is precisely in such creative
reversals that the dispossessed have won their lives back to themselves.

Why should such a possibility be read as arrogation or privilege?
Arrogation of what from where?  Privilege over above whom?  Everybody
possesses this sanctum, and knows it.

This must be boring everybody to death.

But it concerns them, because, like most people, they're poets, or well,
they write poetry, and this whole thing is about whether poetry is a free
act or not.  I believe it is, and I believe this exception, this corner of
the soul "which Satan's watch-fiends cannot find" is the badge that
guarantees it free passage.


As for this---

>>> the insistence
(or rather the point-blank injunction) that we ought to read a poem as if
it were "addressed personally to you, as something liable to change your
life, or have nothing to do with it" is tenacious and mystifying: if
privacy depends upon the arrogation of privileged auditorship to oneself
(when reading e.g. African poems in translation, Juvenal's satires or
eighteenth century hymns), this is a privacy which must violently obscure
the ways in which we are -not- addressed, the ways in which some art is
simply -incapable- of changing our lives, yet might still be very
important to the ways in which we are ourselves capable of
understanding the lives of others.

I see no problem at all.  Changing the way we understand the lives of
others is a change in our own lives, necessarily.  You can read all those
remote things and identify ideological symptoms, like saying 'This is what
they needed to do, in their cultural/economic situation, this was their bid
for hope  in the prevailing terms.... " and that's fair. --  You can read
those far distant poems and shout I spy matriarchy!  I spy the new leisure
!  I spy feudal disdain!.....     This is all fine, but you can also surely
read the most remote thing in time and place,  badly translated through
three languages and respond by nothing much more than "Ouch."  Because it
hits a recognition which transcends its own history.  Because people aren't
so different.  Because what we witness (and what survives)  is not a
symptom, but a performance, deeply so.


/P




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