From: "Scott Hamilton" <[log in to unmask]>

> All the discussion of poetry and politics the Dalai
> Lama sucks posting seems to have initiated treats
> politics as an OPTIONAL EXTRA for poets - it's like,
> 'should I include political comment in my work'.
>
> I think that Qs about political comment - is it
> possible to write a good sestina about Tony Blair, is
> Mayakovsky more sensitive than Yevtushenko to the
> needs of poetry etc etc  are fundamentally  RED
> HERRINGS.

Or attempts at discrimination.  Some poems are more political than others.
The Mayakovsky poem I cited is explicitly propogandist, intended to incite
the reader to an action (join the Communist Party), the Yevtushenko poem
makes an implicit political comment -- both are more political than many
other poems, in the same way that Shelley's "Mask of Anarchy" is more
political than his "Skylark".  You may not like this, mate, but that's the
way it is.

> Arguing about whether poetry SHOULD be political is
> like arguing whether art should be sociological - of
> course it bloody well already is, itnever fell from
> the sky!

Substitute for poetry in the above, boiling an egg.  The statement is so
indiscriminate as to be not meaningless but useless.

> I would argue that every poem is political because
> every poem is born out of a place in a set of social
> relations, and therefore serves an interest(s) which
> defines itself in terms of its place in those
> relations.

Hm ... Can we juxtapose the upper class Shelley's treatment of birds in "To
a Skylark" to the lower middle class Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale"?

It's elephants all the way down.  When Bertrand Russell asked the old lady
who suggested that the world rested on an elephant, what the elephant
rested on, she said, "It's elephants all the way down."  Creating a totally
inclusive and self-referencing intellectual space is the ideological
equivalent to solipsism, and about as useful.  Why the Providential vision
of history vanished -- saying "It happened because that's the way God
wanted it to," explains both everything and nothing.

> Hence a sensible Q might be: what place do
> the 6th Dalai Lama's poems come from in Tibetan social
> relations, what interests and conflicts are built into
> their very existence, let alone their aesthetic
> appeal? An obvious start to answering this Q is a
> recognition of the fact that  the guy is writing in a
> language WHOSE VERY EXISTENCE is predicated on a
> feudal set of social relations - it's a language which
> only the upper classes can understand, it's a language
> in which masters obscure their secrets from slaves...

How did the masters indicate to their servants that they desired to be
brought a cup of tea?

Robin Hamilton



%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%