Alison, maybe my writing wasn't the clearest, but I was arguing *against*
the unilateral declarations that all poetry is political (in Scott's post)
and saying yes, it is, but there is an aesthetic bent in the poetry
published in the States and Britain that persists to be what I call
"prissily" refusing to engage the political. And it is this discourse
(poetry, reviews, theory) that exists whether we like it or not, but
certainly not in binary molecular viruses fixating our brains.

Sure, the bourgeoisie’s allergy to history is all over poetry (and I was
afraid my post would be seen as an impulse to accommodate and find middle
ground in this blurry mode, rather than clarify the battlefield). I was
rhetorically reintroducing the point of view of the aesthetes to make this
point and try to sharpen my understanding of opposition in poetic discourse
and turf warring (rather than seek a pedagogical system).

I don’t know what you are seeing, but I was not calling for a grandiose
binaries around which we could spin in sanctity above the hoi polloi. My
point was very simple. Sorry to have to point this out. Hope my credentials
will weather your lofty words.

====

>We can argue against it, but we can’t ignore this "traditional" bias
against
>politics. Exposing it in blanket opposition and denial of it as invalid
>doesn’t address those who don’t want to talk about it or find a place in
>their hearts for it, the political (yuck, me decide/act, and in a poem? It
>would tear the violin heart out of the bourgeois spirit.) Anyway, I’m glad
>they’re there holding down the prissy fort, if only to write against them
>and feel like I’m rising above them (as they undoubtedly do bouncing above
>me).

Manifestly and staggeringly not true.  From William "Bliss it is in this
dawn to be alive" Wordsworth to Paul Celan's anguished lyrics, from Paul
Eluard's poem Liberty being dropped from planes to inspire Allied soldiers,
to Virgil's epic claims for the Roman Empire, to the inimitable Mr Brecht...
and endlessly on...

Of course poetry has always been embedded in politics, and no real poetry is
"prissy".  If it is said to be so, it is only because the so-called
bourgeosie desire it to be so, and teach that it is so, and those who don't
bother to read poetry properly believe them.  Octavio Paz says the bourgeois
deeply hate poetry, and sometimes I believe him.  I think it is because
poetry is deeply concerned with the idea of freedom.

As a means of checking aesthetic credentials, I don't think any simplistic
binary politics will do: unless you can begin to  accommodate the
subversivenesses within what might appear stylistically to be a deeply
conservative poem (Swift, say), or conversely spot the conservatisms that
can lie behind work that appears stylistically and politically radical (some
of Olson, perhaps).  It's just not good enough to say something like "This
poem uses the language of the rulers, and so is politically suspect.  End of
argument."  Crude polemic and agitprop are the antithesis of poetry, which
alerts more subtle and - dare I say - more interesting energies.

Best

Alison








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