I'm a bit confused. Are you saying that you decide to describe something
and then sit down to write? That the object of the poem preceeds it?
At 12:16 AM 4/27/2001 +0100, Michael Peverett wrote:
>Alison
>
>Your thoughtful remarks have given me a lot to ponder. I'm inclined to think
>you're right about why "ends" is a dirty word.
>
>I will pick up one thread as excuse for the many I must leave. Most poems,
>perhaps, are political. At least poets seem no less political than other
>people, no less hopeful that what they do will produce a political effect.
>And where is this more honourably openfaced than in innovative poems? No
>polite reserve here! And surely this is often good. Dryden without his
>toryism is not much; with it, he begins to concern me. I think the same of
>Mayakovsky, Haavikko, Tranströmer, Pavese... (this list intended, feebly, to
>represent widely differing political outlooks..) Of course, it's
>double-edged. Pound, too, strikes me as insistently political - which
>basically means I won't often read him.
>
>Yet I wouldn't want to say that a poem's end ever just is the poet's
>political intention. The generalized end is more a matter of addressing a
>real thing, a piece of nature. (Of course I mean that to be taken in a wide
>sense.) Things have political implications, yes, but it's the thing itself
>that is the focus .... From my own experience, I'd say that often when
>the poem eventually flies it has ended up making the political view that I
>began by hoping to recommend become a bit questionable. And, somewhat
>ruefully, I leave the poem as it is and take the political view back to the
>workshop for repairs, nonetheless determined to lay it on the line next
>time...
>
>Your question, "A means to what?" neatly draws the line beyond which, as I'm
>sure the above makes obvious, I feel quite inadequate to step. Hardly even
>for one poem; certainly not for "Poetry" in general.
>
>best
>
>mike
>
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