Thanks Kent for your interesting reply - I wasn't so much suggesting that
categorical knowledge should be "transcended" as (thanks Mairead)
resisting the assumption that categories are absolute. It's hard to
resist the observation say that domestic cats are very much like lions
and panthers, and to put them in the same family: these kinds of
classifications are how we have sorted out the world into some kind of
legibility, and we could not do very well without them. However, if that
thinking ceases to be thought of as a model for possible understanding of
the world and comes to be thought of as an absolute reality in itself,
then that is where thinking dessicates: the categorisation obscures
whatever it is being thought about and behaviours which don't fit inside
the category are simply snipped off, to make it fit (like the worst sort
of academic theorising about writing). So, for example, the fact that
homosexual activity amongst mammals was never observed, because it was
assumed that any animals having sex were of course male and female: once
someone started actually sexing the animals by other means, they
discovered that it was quite common. And a million other examples, which
at their crudest are evident in bigotries like racisms, sexisms etc etc.

These are of course commonplace observations and as Kent said, likely to
be agreed with by people of many different persuasions. (Though I doubt
neo-formalists or eugenicists would especially agree). Suffice to say
that I am attempting to put together models of knowing, however
amateurishly, within which I might understand my own impulses and desires.

So, say, Mauricio Kagel's ideas about culture attract me, not least for
how implode terms like "advanced" or "progressive" in art (Kagel is a
composer who as a young man was taught by Borges). He says he is
interested in "random bibliography". "I don't think culture can be a
systematic chronology. Even before I met Borges I discovered that a man
of culture should not be systematical ... The American tradition of
criticism of literature is, for me, rather boring - it's too scientific.
... I am very much interested in history, but not linear history..."

>but
>"specific attention to whatever and however" poetry "is and behaves" might
>best, for us today, involve attention to the transformative qualities of all
>sorts of "non-poetic", ideological matter *outside* the poem and not just to
>the dynamic relationships of compostional proceedings inside it (the artist
>with blinders approach which has consigned Poetry, how could it not, to a
>minor, academic concern within the general culture).
>
>What I'm talking about is attention to where we are in the culture, why we
>write, and what happens to the writing when it's written, issues which, even
>amongst the "avant-garde," seem to me to get rapidly reduced to
>proto-romantic banalities when they are raised.

This is very interesting and can scarcely be dealt with here: underneath
this is the fact that to write poetry, especially in English, means to
write in a minor form which has no or very little impact outside its very
small sphere. Not many people are interested in it. If some strands
have taken refuge in the academy, that is hardly surprising. The truisms
in publishing now are that poetry is marketing death, that it "doesn't
sell", that it's dully academic or mindlessly indulgent self expression,
and in Australia all major publishers have basically dropped their poetry
lists. Universities here are teaching less and less poetry, and the
idea of the liberal arts education only exists as an embattled shadow of
itself in a context where education has been rethought as a private
enterprise extension of what "industry" requires. More and more
booksellers don't have a poetry section at all. I don't think it's very
useful to blame poetry for this: is it the fault of poets that worldwide
media outlets are basically dominated by six people? for the rise and
rise of executive management? the expansion of corporations to
mini-nations? the almost unassailable economic dominance of the US?
We're not that important.

In these circumstances, to write poetry seriously at all is a ridiculous
enterprise: and yet people continue to do so, and in all sorts of ways.
There is _no ground_ for doing so, if one accepts the "non-poetic"
ideologies which are dominant in our time. Or even if you don't accept
them. And perhaps the "proto-Romantic banalities" to which you're
referring (I'm not sure what you mean here, just guessing) are as-yet
inarticulate movements towards some other ways of thinking. Certainly, a
major concern of many avant-garde movements in the 20C have been
generally - not always - towards destroying pre-existing ideas of self,
in revolt against the bourgeois power strucures which created them -
aleatory experiments say in composition, painting, poetry, the
inheritances of Dada - a constant undermining of one's own assumptions,
as Sontag said in 1967. But she also wondered, even then, how far the
resources of irony could stretch. "It seems unlikely that the
possibilities of undermining one's assumptions can go on unfolding
indefinitely into the future, without being eventually checked by despair
or by a laugh which leaves one without any breath at all."

Which is I reckon about where we are now. I don't believe that an ironic
attitude towards one's own impossibility is any longer tenable; it seems
to me to run too easily into bankruptcy (say, how easily Britart segues
into advertising, to take an obvious example, or the easy absorption of
de-meaning into popular culture, how different is Tracy Ermin's bed from
Big Brother?). It's not like there are any answers, either. In the
meantime, and only glancing at the question of war and global politics,
we're right in the middle of an environmental holocaust which now is
unstoppable. I keep running right into the question of ethics, and what
that might mean, when I wonder about poetry and its relation to the
"outside". And what can poetry do? Except perhaps create and preserve,
however minorly, possibilities of human complexity and meaning and
relationship which sometimes seem in danger of extinction. Is that worth
doing? In a wider sense, I don't know. For myself, I give it a value.

Now run right off topic, and not sure if I've made any sense at all.

Best

Alison