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Alison wrote:
> 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?).
I was recently at a lecture by the editor of Poetry Review, a lecture which
easily have been entitled 'In Defence of Irony' rather than poetry. He
quoted extensive examples of what he felt were desirable exemplars of the
'right way' in poetry, particularly the work by the US poet Mark Halliday. I
asked him a simple question: how could an aesthetic of ironised banality be
distinguishable from a cult of cliche?
He could not give me an answer.
What comes over to me from 'mainstream' ironies is a strategy of superiority
of voice: possession of the correct tone confirms the owner as being above
some nameless and unwanted state, and the voice merges, like New Labour with
big business, into highly conservative tactics of social distancing. It
marks off 'insiders' from 'outsiders'.
Speaking very very broadly, on the 'other side', in avant-garde poetry,
irony seems a strategy of confirming meaninglessness, a gesture politics
only, which generates its anti-climactic let-downs while precluding any
possibility of climax. In its refusal of possibility it is too essentially
conservative, as is the mainstream tendency.
Alison' mention of Britart is of interest here, in that visual art, unlike
poetry, does have penetration of the media and associations with financial
reward. Something I am very mindful of is why it is that London and New York
dominate the art world: one reason, it would seem , is that their lack of
maket regulation makes them the centres for the international trade in
recycling stolen art. I think it very instructive to contemplate Britart in
the context of this, as well of course as the patronage of people like Mr
Saatchi.
One can see things like the New Generation poetry in Britain as little
unintentionally parodic imitations, by the small fry, of the big fish.
david bircumshaw
----- Original Message -----
From: <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, May 21, 2001 2:52 AM
Subject: Re: prose as poetry
> 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
>
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