Oops sorry, I meant to make a couple more comments on
this issue...

"I also find your interpretation of the Tibetan
upper-class language is very
interesting, coming from someone publishing a web
magazine. How many of
those poor, slaves have ready access to your poetry?"

Salt does not exist anymore as a going concern, but
when it did it was physical too (and it looked darned
good!). But more importantly, I was not trying to
suggest that all the poetry in 'official' Tibetan was
hopelessly compromised, any more than Pound was
hopelessly compromised by the role that his fascist
Cantos and broadcasts seemed to play - what I was
doing was calling attention to the relevance of the
fact of the Dalai Lama's language's exclusivity to any
real understanding of it. I actually think than an
appreciation of such stuff is deepened rather than
damaged by such an understanding.

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."

One of the things I have been pushing on this list is
the idea that poems underdetermine their use, that the
way they are used counts for more than their content.
What if I got up in the middle of a speech by the vice
Chancellor of my old university, who is a right-wing
philistine trying to destroy the Arts on campus,,
about the need for Arts depts to focus less on
'uncommercial literary and artistic pursuits'(he
occasionally makes this sort of speech) and more on
the task of 'training a modern workforce'by teaching
them 'clear and relevant communication' and read 'the
Skylark', then went home and posted the text of 'The
Mask of Anarchy' to an e list of linguists studying
19th Century English vocabulary... I mean, which poem
would have been more political that day?
 OK that's a slightly silly example, but the point is
not silly - it is the social USE of a poem, not its
intrinsic properties, that is decisive in the
determination of its meaning. Hence the comparative
unimportance of the intrinsic political 'content' of a
poem compared to the use that is made of it. Of
course, sometimes patterns of use are codified by
formalists (and some coffee-lovers, I suppose) into an
aesthetic, and the task of those with my perspective
is made rather harder than it would otherwise be.

In the following passage I again get spanked unjustly
- again it is assumed that it is the intrinsic
properties of poems, which are undoubtedly motivated
by and indicative of all sorts of quirks and
contingencies, do not underdetermine the use of poems:

> 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,"

But I want it to be mathematically rigorous! It's not
mathematically rigorous now, but that doesn't mean it
never will be.  All we are talking about is the
movement of the social sciences toward the same
destination as the natural sciences.

Cya
Scott





=====
"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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