I liked the speech, John, and how it touches on so many points of dilemma and contradiction, and its preoccupations with what an ethics might be, practically and theoretically.
>A poet is not necessarily going to challenge a power structure, but I
>feel strongly that to evolve an ethical consciousness, we must place
>pressure on language, encourage its growth. It is clear that I feel the
>poet is obliged to challenge the centrality of the state, to challenge
>controls over free will and intellect. But these expressions themselves
>are the product of 'Western Civilisation' - of a culturally
>appropriative machine, a religion absorber, a product substituter, and
>above all else, a systemiser of patriarchy*. Most poetry canons are the
>extension of patriarchy. The poem is the body inscribed with codes of
>conduct.
It seems to me we all have to somehow negotiate these problems, while acknowledging our own complicities, voluntary or otherwise. (I didn't choose to be born speaking English, for instance...) Not that there are any simple answers.
It also strikes chords with Kate Fagan's recent comments at the Poetry Festival in Sydney, where she said in part (to excerpt a complex and supple paper, with apologies):
"When I write de-emphasisingı, I really mean holding poetry up to close scrutiny: testing its loci of power, its colonising and exhausted replications of particular ways of thinking, and its always-contemporary potential as a zone for philosophical imagination and excitation, and for happiness (to acknowledge the title of this afternoonıs panel). I mean admitting and owning up to the circumstances of a poemıs making; laying bare the organising body, and interpreting the effects.
Within this process, we might encounter our poetical ethics, or our poethics (to use writer Joan Retallackıs term). We might move beyond an oppositional politics of poetry, frequently-rehearsed, that places clearı or direct self-expression on one side of a divide and abstraction or a particular sort of linguistic self-consciousness on the other. This boundary needs critique. Or rather, we need to recognise that it has always been a moveable fabrication, an ordering strategy; one that prevents us from exploring the generative reach of language, its shocks of difference."
Best
Alison
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