It is ever so much fun to be tossed into the politics of New Zealand,
whate'er they might be. However, I'd like to note that, even though I worked
for several years (1982-86) for John Broomfield, now of Te Wairua, Apuau
Channel,Private Bag, Havelock, Marlborough, the closest I've come to getting
to NZ was a soujourn in Hawai'i about 12 years back.

However, it has been my experience that people who find the luggage poets of
interest in different national contexts always have reasons to do so that
make sense to them in their immediate (local/regional) contexts. Thus it was
the oppositional discourse of langpo (lugpo?) that was of interest to
certain avant-garde writers in Ye Ol' Soviet Union who might otherwise quite
easily be cast as anti-Marxists. (& at roughly the same time that I was
bringing Boris Kagarlitsky, a post-trotskyist member of the Moscow City
Council, to the Bay Area to give talks.)

And in Spain there were two clusters of folks, one to the north interested
in the politics of the work, another to the south (and even the Canary
Islands) who saw a connection to the New American Poets (esp. the
Projectivists) as being what was/is of interest.

What does it mean to say that X or Y is wrong?

Attempts to cast such discourses into the high contrast of black & white
photography (or any other mere dualism) can only miss the point as much as
the anti-globalists do today who fail to recognize that Marx was the
greatest globalist of them all. Or that, to pick an example from my own
Philly backyard, that it is perfectly possible for a guilty person to
receive a grotesquely unfair trial, but that neither makes him innocent nor
a major political thinker, even though it certainly does mean that he
deserves the honest trial he never had.

I sometimes think that lack of subtlety is our greatest enemy. What are the
politics of a complex thought?

Ron




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