Scott, Ron and all,
Scott seems to know much more about the politics of NZ
writers with an interest in L= poetry than I do. I just haven't met all
these right-wingers; we must move in different circles. I know more
about my own politics than he does though.
But we are talking history here. My own education in politics
was certainly dominated by the Vietnam war. One of the first lessons
though was that the 'institutions of political struggle' on which i had
come to rely in New Zealand, didn't really exist in the US. The
student movement was a movement, we engaged in protests, ,strikes,
sit-ins, marches, boycotts, got beaten, arrested etc; we had no
INSTITUTIONS and we didn't STRUGGLE in that Marxist sense.
Mostly the leaders were people who had good skills as activists,
mostly they were politically 'unlettered', and ideologically innocent.
They were middle-class, which to me meant they were affluent.
Another is that it was a 'period'--the times change. You change. I
have I think I have led several political lives, and there are more in
store; my attitude to all of them keeps changing.
The newspaper last week carried a story about a 40th
anniversary celebration of the founding of the Princes Street Branch of
the Labour Party, once the most effective leftwing 'ginger group'
branch in the institution. The current Labour Prime Minister was a
member of it, the current Speaker of the House was one of the
founders along with myself and a few others. They didn't invite me.
Pissed me off.
Wystan
>
>
> "One of the curious
> "advantages," to call it that, that the langpos had
> was that the experience
> of the Vietnam period was something shared by an
> enormous number of people.
> As disparate as the writing in, say, In the American
> Tree may be, it would
> have been far more diffuse without that common
> experience. And it is
> precisely the absence of such that younger poets today
> have to come up
> against."
>
>
> I think we agree here. The post-Langpo 'generation' is
> far more 'declassed', diffuse. Fewer organic links to
> other parts of society, to institutions of political
> struggle (as I noted, things may be changing). In NZ,
> many of the poets who talk most about the Language
> Poets pursue a right-wing politics, or else valourise
> a disastrous apathy. They have literally locked
> themselves in their offices (to think about differance
> in peace and quiet, I guess) while their students have
> been beaten about the head by police batons 100 metres
> away. Because of this they (not necessarily Silliman
> and Bernstein et al) face what one might politely call
> a credibility deficit amongst younger poets and
> theorists.
>
>
> "Personally, I'd rather not have a major imperialist
> war with millions dying.
> The ones we already have are bad enough."
>
> The implication is that it was the Vietnam war was the
> chief factor that led to the rise in what we might as
> well cause class struggle between, roughly, 68-74. I
> do not think this is a credible view - strikes me as
> idealist in flavour (not to mention idealistic). The
> anti-war movement, I would argue, was as much a
> symptom as a cause of the 68-74 struggles.
> Not every Imperialist war invites mass resistance.
> Where was the mass mobilisation against the Korean
> War? What about the Gulf War, which attracted far
> smaller mobilisations than Nam? What about the British
> imperialist adventure in Northern Ireland, which saw
> far bigger mobilisations against it in the rest of the
> UK in 68-74 than in the 80s or the 90s? Why did the
> 68-74 mobilisations touch areas of the world
> unaffected or relatively unaffected by Nam?
> Anyway, those are just some thoughts. I was just a
> twinkling in my parents' eyes most of that time...
>
> Cya
> Scott
>
>
>
>
>
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> Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2000 10:34:09 PDT
> Subject: sub-neo-Symbolist fudge
> From: "Ron Silliman" <[log in to unmask]>
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>
> Between "sub-neo-Symbolist sludge" and "apocalyptic
> wallpaper," a lot of
> good work is being written, though it's politics tends
> to be different (as
> distinct from "not there") because the people are
> different. Even Ashbery
> (whom I still read) has a politics, even if it is very
> much pre-Stonewall.
>
> Not only are the people different, so is the context.
> One of the curious
> "advantages," to call it that, that the langpos had
> was that the experience
> of the Vietnam period was something shared by an
> enormous number of people.
> As disparate as the writing in, say, In the American
> Tree may be, it would
> have been far more diffuse without that common
> experience. And it is
> precisely the absence of such that younger poets today
> have to come up
> against.
>
> Personally, I'd rather not have a major imperialist
> war with millions dying.
> The ones we already have are bad enough.
>
> One of the interesting things about time is how it
> alters works of art.
> Looking at the painters of the 1960s, especially the
> ones who followed the
> apocalyptic wallpaper set, I notice how sharply
> political the works of Andy
> Warhol seem even now, compared with the droll design
> noodling of a
> Rauschenbrg. Jack Spicer's poetry seems to get more
> contemporary every year,
> while even the best works of Levertov and Dorn strike
> me as being as frozen
> in time as Grateful Dead records or Fillmore posters.
> (In Denise's case,
> maybe Nat King Cole and Studebakers.) Very few of the
> '50s painters really
> _evolved_ all that much after their work initially
> matured -- the most
> compelling exception being DeKooning.
>
> Besides, I thought sub-neo-Symbolist sludge was a new
> ice cream flavor from
> Ben & Jerry's.
>
> Ron
>
>
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> =====
> "Why is it not possible for me to doubt that I have never been on the moon? And how
> could I try to doubt it? First and foremost, the supposition that perhaps I have
> been there would strike me as idle. Nothing would follow from it, nothing be
> explained by it. It would not tie in with anything in my life... Philosophical
> problems occur when language goes on holiday. We must not separate ideas from life,
> we must not be misled by the appearances of sentences: we must investigate the
> application of words in individual language-games" - Ludwig Wittgenstein
>
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