> I would argue that every poem is political because
> every poem is born out of a place
Just the one? The one place? A single identifiable locus: here?
Or here?
Habitus is a many-splendoured thing. Ask people about where they are, who
they are, they will give you a narrative. My parents were...here is where I
went to school...here is the spot in the woods where...I worked for a few
years as a...I harbour secret sexual desires for...
> in a set of social
> relations,
Which sounds more mathematically rigorous than it can possibly hope to be,
although you can have fun with the idea that, there being no final "set of
sets", there is effectively no such thing as society...either that, or
society is something other than the set of all sets of social relations...
> and therefore serves an interest(s)
What are these interests that dominate all? What agent has them?
Poetry can be interesting/interested without *serving* interests, I think.
There is also a kind of _decenza_ or principled disinterest which poets have
occasionally attempted to practice; perhaps this is an elaborate
self-mystification, but I think it would need looking at closely as a
discipline or "technique of the self".
What goes without saying when one talks about poetry (or "art 'n' culture"
generally) as "serving" interests is that the language of the poem is an
instrument of power; not just any kind of power, either, but power exercised
in the cause of social domination. Hence its servitude. Poetry is assumed to
be servile. Its masters are either the masters one hates, or the masters
with whom one wishes to replace them. This strikes me as perfectly true of
propaganda, and inadequately true of the kind of "art 'n' culture" that
propaganda despises as a weak and useless instrument. Poetry is actually
bloody useless at serving the interests of most of the factions vying for
domination most of the time, which is one of the reasons why it gets
marginalised by them. Broadband internet access (of whom to whom?), on the
other hand...
- Dom
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