Some remarks on Jon's remarks:
>
>Poetry in the English speaking world is now part of the academic
>humanities
>
Despite being myself a poet in a UK university, I don't think this statement
is on the whole true of the UK. Creative Writing is still marginal - and
often thought of as suspect - in the universities here. Most successful
poets seem to be outside the universities, building their careers through
readings, non-academic creative writing, Poetry Society-type marketing
exercises and subsidized projects of various kinds. Even the study of poetry
seems pretty marginal these days.
>
>In other words the publication of poetry is, like everything else
>to which our society assigns any value, a matter of power -- a
>minor and marginal power in terms of society in general, but
>power nevertheless.
>
When was it otherwise? Success always depends on power. It's hard to see how
you could ever hope to separate power from merit in an activity like poetry
in which no objective measurement of success is possible.
>
>The idea that the writing is the poem -- that is, that a poem is what we
>today call a text -- is generally characteristic of late and
>decadent periods.
>
The concept of a decadent period means nothing to me. Every age is late, and
most think they're decadent. Writing is certainly a later development than
speech, but I can't see what conclusions as to the health or otherwise of
society can be drawn from that chronological sequence.
>
>I don't think our present situation has any technological
>solution so long as those solutions are still a form of writing.
>What's needed is to get back to the utterable source.
>
I'm not a great admirer of Jacques Derrida, but I still find this
idealization of the spoken word bizarre. You can't really believe that we
would all be better off if we gave up reading and writing, surely?
>
>I most certainly don't mean a society where poetry
>is only transmitted in pub readings.
>
Why not, I wonder? It does seem that poetry is far more oral than it was a
few years ago. The vogue for readings means that most poets are much more
professional as performers than their predecessors. It has also helped to
make them into a community. I encountered an example of this when I was
arranging speakers for the forthcoming conference at Glamorgan. Poets were
easy to book - they make their contact details generally available, and
besides I know lots of them, just by having gone to their readings and got
talking to them afterwards. But novelists have no such communal culture. To
contact them one had to go through the publishers (always an uncertain
process). I had the strong impression that novelists regard their work as
private, communicating only via the printed page, whereas poets are not only
writers but also entertainers, all-round communicators. I think this is a
good thing - though it does mean that those whose writing is less suited to
performance can lose out.
Matthew Francis
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01443 482856
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