Claudia Keelan, in new Fence (#8), leads off her notational essay "An Ethics
of Practice: Reading and Writing Spiritual Utility" with the following quote
from Keats: "A poet is the most unpoetical of anything because he has no
identity-- he is continually in for-- and filling some other body..." She
expalins in a footnote that it is this Keatsian spirit which the
"avant-garde" extends, as opposed to those poets of the Self, who, following
Wordsworth, promenade themselves "under a banner named authenticity." Those
poets who laudably follow in Keats's step see, according to Keelan, "No self
but in other. No poem but in the destruction of the poem by the reader whose
reading makes a new exchange."
So my "question": If this is the so, why is it that there is such a dearth
of *actual experiment* in forms and unfoldings of "poetic identity"? Why is
it that even the most radical textual "experiment" seems to bring itself up
short at the inner threshold of the legal self and its name, the latter
always stamped, without a thought, onto the poem, so that any "new exchange"
is, ipso facto, a transaction always restrained within the bounds of a
delimited cultural economy, the very coin of which instantiates and
guarantees a value to the Self *vis a vis* the Other?
That's not to say, of course, that ethics and a regard of the Other are any
less relevant within habitual and protocoled arrangements; but might there
be a whole Outside of *ethical poetic praxis* yet waiting to be explored
beyond the limen of conventionalized Authorship? Might tentative,
speculative moves in such direction today tend to readily be given the
stigma of 'hoax', 'fraud', 'fake', 'forgery' in great part *because* of the
comfort of habit and safety of protocol?
Just musing, since we've been talking about ethics...
Kent
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