>We may be witnessing the working out of a (troubling and difficult)
>assertion/ prediction? of Charles Olson's which I don't have immediately to
>hand but I think goes: "The Private is Public and the Public is where we
>behave"
Thanks - as usual, I was jumping in feet first. The private is public,
the personal is political, and any slogan you can think of - there are
truths in all that, but I'm not sure how far they get you -
I wonder how many others here write poetry from a place of
solitude/reverie? I've always been fascinated by Foucault's description
of the soul as a place scored and traversed by trajectories of power: it
strikes me as a correct description. But those scorings become blurred
if privacy is insufficient, in my experience anyway - the social persona
exists in part to make those scorings less visible. The self is
permeable, yes, distinctions are blurred, yes, but poems for me resonate
in silence. And to be honest I don't much care if the silence is
imaginary or not: if it's imagined, it is real. In poems, anyway. The
presence a poem creates - words on a page or screen or vanishing on air -
is not the presence of the human being who wrote them, although that is
implicate - the poem is not the same as the writer, however linked.
I was thinking of Sylvere Lotringer's black comments on the vanishing of
privacy.
Forgive me, but from here Sparty Lea sounds like a comedy sketch. I have
a lot of sympathy with an impulse to memorialise, but am also extremely
suspicious for various reasons of that desire to embalm experience in the
aspic of myth. I think I was badly scarred by reading a collection of
Virginia Woolf's tea party invitations at an early age.
Best
Alison
Alison Croggon
Editor
Masthead Literary Arts Magazine
PO Box 186
NEWPORT VIC 3015
Masthead online: http://www.masthead.com.au
Home page: http:www.fortunecity.com/victorian/bronte/338
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