>>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
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