Kent says:
>Thus, my question: How can poets begin to effectively *poeticize the
>institutional structures of ideology*, rather than merely accept them as
>natural and beyond poetry's aim?
I thought this question had been a painful one since Virgil burnt the
Aeneid - since Aechylus bribed the Eumenides into their nice grove and
gave the CEO position to Athena - which is to say, how can poetry not
have a bad conscience, since it's been singing the kings and bruiting the
empire since time immemorial? (Which of course you ask also, but it
seems we're turning in circles...)
(Apart from Sappho, of course. And who was she? Nobody knows. A woman
who wrote lyrics about love.)
And now it's lost its official function of Celebrator of the King's
Phallus and some poets are very sad about that. Hence the continuous
creation of faux laureates, even mooted in Australia. We'd all like to
be important.
There's an invitation to scepticism in the lack of power of poetry, and
behind that scepticism other possibilities. We don't have to buy the
corporate lingo if we don't want it, we don't have to imitate the
anonymity and ethic-free zone of corporate bureaucracy, which takes off
with its bonuses when the bubble bursts (and Kent, this is the nub of the
doubt I have, the question - How such a strategy be radical? or ethical?)
Oral poetry in an oral society depended on literal presence - someone
couldn't say something to you unless they were there. That is, the
commitment - the physical commitment - of performance. The text may have
been anonymous, but its presentation was anything but. Can recordings be
"oral" in the same way? Well, I don't know... but it seems to me that
listening to Randolph Healey on a tape is very much listening to Randolph
Healey, even more than reading his poetry on a page.
But I'm making little sense here, it's too early in the morning.
Best
Alison
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