>Neruda,
>Mayakovsky and others wrote great poems of protest in the last century , but
>they are of an exclusively public form of speech which resonates only as
>long as you believe the speaker is 'on the right side'. The same rhetorical
>modes could just as easily be turned to darker ends.
I presume David that you're speaking of a minority of these poets' poems
- perhaps Neruda's Odes to Stalin or work of that sort, which certainly
doesn't do it for me as his other work does. Because it seems to me that
their work as a whole, even say Neruda's poems of protest against the
Spanish Civil War which are so full of public rhetoric, most definitely
and blatantly defies those "other censorships", clinging so often to the
interstices of the quotidian; the obscure, the private, the hidden felt
world, and which indeed admits the ambiguity of all speech.
Best
Alison
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