Alison -- hello Alison -- wrote:
" That
is why I can't agree with Keston's suggestion that the
contemporary equivalent of God in lyric would be the
State (did I read you wrong, Keston?) and would go
rather with Pound's Propertius, who explicitly
describes his poetry as other to the State sponsored
poets who celebrate Empire. This quality, among
others, makes lyric inherently subversive: by its
nature it is inimical to given structure, although it
might well be in disguise."
I don't think the other poets were state-sponsored; the grudge was tossed
rather at Maecenas, patron of great otium cum dignitate. Pound himself
admired a good patron when he saw one, though of course he also despised
the unthinking "connoisseur" who buys "half a dozen" Lewis's, Epsteins or
whatever. Indeed Pound thought his own poetry fundamentally involved in,
reflective of and supportive of State structures (and not only the
Italian). He was committed to an American renaissance, based it would
seem on the effloresences of the Italian city-states (and so tenaciously
anachronistic). I don't think anything is -inherently- subversive:
subversion is an act and movement, turning beneath what stands. The happy
alternate default seems to me a perk of the semiotician, vicarious and
always unevinced. How did Propertius actually subvert? How do other
lyric poets? Brecht has been mentioned: what would Brecht have thought of
his own committed efforts at writing a subversive poetry, if he were told
that all lyric is inherently subversive anyhow? I think he was doing a
lot more than rendering overt an inherent quality.
I said in that earlier note that addresses to the state could be not the
equivalent, but the -opposite- of the old overheard addresses to
God. That is, the addressed entity -includes- rather than excludes those
who might overhear the address. Overhearing prayer we are necessarily
not ourselves the addressed object; hearing a poem directed at the state,
we necessarily -are- that object, or at least (depending on yr
politix) have a share in it.
K
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