This is a difficult subject to encompass and one that it is much easier to
discuss in the context of societies other than one's own and present
language-culture-world. It is all too easy to formulate a language of
generalised protest that brings in such cardboard cut-outs as the oppressed
masses and offers an easy way to a poetry of panaceas and slogans. But
poetry speaks always, if it speaks at all, to that questionable certain
concept 'we' all live by: an individual. But at moments of privacy,
intersections of one and many, not in a private language. I don't think it
is possible to _truthfully_ quantify, measure the 'social and political'
effects of poetry, except on a rather grand and remote stage. 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.
The realities of our 'real' lives elude that rhetoric, for a poetry that
tackles the true censorships of our speech-world may well take forms that
appear 'merely' personal, or private and obscure. And it is in the shadows
of that last word, in 'obscurity', that most of the repression of our
societies takes place, undeclared and unprotested.
david b
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