Peter --
>If a biographer wasn't allowed to say anything that portrayed any of the
>people the subject had encountered in other than glowing colours,
>there'd be precious few biographies, and no interesting ones.
>Does/should the work of an unpublished poet have some special status in
>this regard?
Good point, and as a reader of such I would agree. So would we all,
perhaps, so long as the person about whom we are reading never knew us,
never read our work as a publisher's reader & turned it down. I wonder if
this is just a case of being personally burned? I suspect it would be
possible to show the writer at work without necessarily breaking
confidences by actually including his or her very words? Or maybe, here as
elsewhere, however much it pains us, we need to be against any form of
censorship, & take the consequences of that stand as they occasionally hit
home...
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
(h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
How, but thru a monstrous 'specialism', the so-called authority
of erstwhile 'professionals', have we come to leave
_breath_ out of images and _images_ out of breath, anyhow?
Roy Kiyooka
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