Alison

I'm starting to form a distinct impression that Kent is getting rather
grimpinoise on this matter.

Whaddya reckon?

Best

Dave


----- Original Message -----
From: <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, June 07, 2001 12:25 AM
Subject: Re: Levinas's door/ collaboration/ ideology


> 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
>