Coral wrote:
>The trouble is the Aussie media often takes up time with poets disputes,
>when it might be talking about Australian poetry - sometimes not the
>poets, but simply the art - the poetry. Is that too much to ask?
It seems too much to ask of most arts coverage here. Very little of any
of it addresses the art at all: publicity always focusses on the "angle"
(personality, controversy, whatever). Reviews, very depressingly, tend
to follow suit, especially in the mainstream media. It seems worse in
poetry coverage, which is already marginalised and minimal; the "trivial
crap" only confirms prejudices already fairly deeply ingrained in the
minds of those who think poets are guys in poofy shirts responsible for
tormenting them at school.
I find the comments on the reluctance to call Wright or Hope "great"
poets interesting. "Great" is a fairly meaningless term, in a sense; I
use it myself, to express, well, abiding and inspired enthusiasm for
particular poets and poems, but you can't exactly call it an _accurate_
term. But that aside, for me the telling thing about this reluctance to
give two of our greatest poets their due is how expressive it is of a
general lack of generous response. A sense that to admire with all your
being is somehow diminishing; the fact that to admit that you've been
knocked out by a poem might reflect somehow on you (not having written
it); a terrible smallness and milling, which cannot admit poetry is a
living stream, bigger than any of us, which moves and breathes and
richens us. It's as if reading is a process of somehow dessicating poems
and neatly categorising them in boxes, rather than EATING them, absorbing
them into their own being. Are people afraid of appearing foolish? of
being "wrong"? Do they distrust their own responses so deeply?
I mean, I bet nobody got up at this conference and said: No, I think AD
Hope is a _terrible_ poet, because... and then was answered by someone
who said, No, he achieved this and this, how can you say that? And the
other saying, yes, he did that, but can't can't you see how this implies
that... I've seen such an argument in a French theatre among the audience
during a post-play discussion (attended, I might add, by 300 people -
unheard of here) with various people standing up and shouting Non! Non!
Apart from being great theatre for those who are present, it's also an
expression of passionate belief, in the first place, in the art form; and
secondly, of a serious investment in it by an audience. That is, they
believe that the art speaks to their personal lives, their social
environment, their intellectual desires; that it matters and it means.
Even if they vehemently disagree with the work in question.
So much - not all - of Australian critical life is about shutting down
responses, not rocking the boat, anxious fence-sitting,
watching-your-arse and bad faith anti-intellectualism, and as a result so
much of it functions with a background noise of petty back-biting, bile
and subterranean feuds. Oh, where's the joy in that?
Best
Alison
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