I don't see how people can be either insulted or abused by an investive
directed at a collective proposition, unless they set themselves in
dependancy on it. I'm saying exactly how I have found it to be, in a
forty-year experience of the British poetical avant-garde. I'd love to
have found it differently, but I would by lieing in my teeth if I described
it in any other way. (and I did allow a lot of exception, really a lot).
You could say this is a "Cambridge" experience, quite possibly so -- at
present poetical arguments in this place are usually settled by punching
people to the ground and kicking them. But I don't think it is just that.
I'm campaigning against blanket-thought, convention, automatism.
Sontag's remark was a particularly courageous act in the presence of senior
Israeli officials to whom it was directed. (How I insult Palestinians by
quoting it defeats me). Most of the people who complain about disaffection
from the militancy of the avant-garde are motivated by their own
ambitions, I have seen this again and again and again, they mean precisely
their own triumph, or even ( in Cambridge) their supremacy. Not all, most.
I allow a lot of exception. It is the collective sense of the avant-garde
project which is a dead cause, I said so. It's been going on for over a
century and it's got nowhere. It was ten times brighter in 1914 than it has
ever been since. Dada made no claims of suprematist critique or depth
subversion: it was lively, disturbing, humorous, human, generous, it was
even fun (until that fool Duchamp got his hands on it). (Some 50 percent
of what goes on now is unacknowledged repetition of practices first tried
around 1910-1920).
I said it needs rethinking and it does. No more than "the kind of poetry
promoted by The Guardian", but equally, probably. You can't depend on
that collective sense of purpose, it is in ravenous conflict within itself.
See?
Cool it, and I have a point which I don't think the A-G can afford to dismiss.
Actually, I think Douglas Olvier was the last person who could have held
the whole of the leftist poetry scene together, he had the breadth of
vision for that (which I don't, I'm too focussed) and also a kind of
essential foolishness.
I salute all your valiant efforts,
/PR
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