Jeremy, by unsophisticated poetry I mean writing which is not too obviously
tailored to a particular audience, which applies poetry's innate resources
(imaginative synthesis & verbal music) toward a thematic rather than
superficially rhetorical end, constructive rather than manipulative,
open to an audience without borders.  Thus, I'm using "unsophisticated"
in an ironic sense: Whitman, Dickinson, Shakespeare were unsophisticated
in this sense, to some extent & in very different ways.  Their poetic
rhetoric was directed "outward", thematically, emotionally, politically.

What bothers me about the "avant-garde tradition" scene is the knee-jerk
dichotomizing between mainstream (Heaney?) & avant-garde (Prynne?
Bernstein?) which for the most part translates into academic rather than
general audiences and a kind of incestuous relationship between critical
theory and "difficult", "marginal", "innovative" writing.

Your concept of "underwriting" has a sort of Janus face: on the one hand,
an exploration of the undercurrents in a text can open up the very
"incarnational" exactitude of meaning & motive that appeals to me; on
the other hand, the eagerness to dig up the subtext has a familiar
deterministic ring to it, which unfortunately is the one and only
THEME of much of the soi-disant poesie der poesie - writing about
writing, writing about writing's alienation from any readership
whatsoever.  That's a stale theme which is really only the BEGINNING
of the problem for a poet (whom does s/he address?
The underwriter is the interlocutor, the listener).

Henry

Jeremy wrote:
Now, to be much too blunt and brief (it's late), a couple of questions
about your own position: I'm curious as to what you mean by
unsophisticated (esp. in the context of Jones - not a coterie poet, I
agree, but demanding of a highly specialized and prepared kind of
reader, and thereby cultic by default?); and also, I'm wondering
whether there's a need to underwrite that openness of outward direction to
which you refer (sorry, you put it much better than that), and if so, who
does the underwriting?  That's to say, if for Jones poetry is
incarnational, then the underwriter - I should type that in upper case,
presumably - is clear (and, though I'm hopelessly uninformed about
Levinas, I'd have thought that theological categories come into play
with him also).  Can the openness and directness (or incarnation?) bypass
or somehow remain immune to all the unpleasant things that condition speech,
writing and poetry too, including the distribution of kinds of knowledge
and attention available (social provision of poetry)?  (also puzzling
about the "source of inspiration" - must that remain indeterminate, pure,
Psyche - or can it be construed in more social fashion, i.e. the polis in
different voices?).

Anyway, thanks for the good message...

Jeremy