Dom,

a similar discussion arose a month or so ago ; if one browses the June
"subject list" of Poetryetc will find evidence of the various ideas which
sprung from our discussion on this topic, at the time.
if I remember well, Dom, you were one of those who offered some of the most
interesting and enlightening observation on politics in poetry.

I am here sending a poem by Franco Fortini on the subject of poetry and
politics, as well as some autobiographical critical to Summer is not all,
Selected Poems by Franco Fortini, (Carcanet, 1992, translated and edited by
Paul Lawton).

During and after the Liberation Fortini was a partisan and a politically
committed poet.
In his introduction to this English edition he noted:
"Adorno, with is passion for negative aspects, devoted, in my view,
too little emphasis to the confirmatory social aspects of poetry and art
- while we should remember that poetry is always sung at the tables of the
mighty and powerful.
(...) Alessandro Manzoni has a sentence which deals, in a sort of frozen
calm, with poetics and ethics:
Poetry is a truth   seen by the mind once and for all...or, to be more
precise, irrevocably."

 In Fortini's and in Manzoni's view, this would imply a dialectical
interaction between the external objective, natural, historical truth, and
the mind confronting  that truth and grasping  it in a formalized
aesthetical  dimension. In a way, this could be seen also political, since
dialectical interchanges tend to be such (consequently, loosing, in my own
view, ideological compactness).
By the way, I have here Paul Fry's : A defense of Poetry, Reflections on the
Occasion of Writing.
It is merely a suggestion for those who wish to find out Fry's point of view
on this topic, a investigation of which the most intriguing bit is the
conclusive chapter "The Ethics of Suspending Knowledge." (p.201)

Franco Fortini
from Poetry and error (1946-1957)
(The translation is mine)

"That young German"

That young German
wounded on the quay by the Seine
at the foot of a building
during the Insurrection
who was dying all alone
while Paris howled
round the Hotel de Ville
dying without a whisper
with his forehead against the pavement.

That fascist in Turin
who fired for two hours
and then came down in the street
in his spotless shirt
and elegant manners
saying: Right, let's go.
wiping the sweat off his brow
with a silk scarf.

Poetry serves nothing
its spell is powerless
when it will be time again
I know you will kill me.

I've read Lenin and Marx
I don't fear the Revolution
but it's to late for me;
if only my words
could help - when I'll be gone -
those who will live
freed of our pride.

(Translated by EP, 4 August 2000)


>
> 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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