From: fshck@UMAC on 06/06/2001 11:58 PM

OK Kent
apologies for being vague and cryptic - an occupational hazard...
it's late where I am now...

i guess one line of thought i had in mind was that declaring poetry on the world
can be a way of evading responsibility...
i'm thinking particularly of kristevan ambivalent logic - if i can mean yes and
no at the one time then what hope have i got for a consistent position or to
have any ethics? (i think this is an issue closely related to the multiple
personae problematics you've been thinking through)... novelists and dramatists
solve this problem conventionally by resolving but poets and postmodernists of
every colour are too clever to be caught that way...

now i say this very much as one who wishes to regularly declare poetry on the
world - one of the great tribe of presumptuous little so-and-sos who infest
lists like this...

and i say it seeing the ethics problem not as insurmountable but as a kind of
routine dilemma - perhaps not so different from that of the prosecutor told not
to lead the witness or the playwright who has to show not tell

to me the idea of poeticising institutional structures goes beyond that kind of
problematic into theatres of cruelty perhaps
i note the terms are aptly starred -
but there's somewhere the muzak begins
in supermarkets there's the worldwide nausea of christmas

i've tried a couple of times on this list to point to pierre bourdieu's idea of
art worlds as the economic world reversed:
worlds in which popularity means unpopularity and vice versa - a generalised
game of loser wins i think he says somewhere ... i think these observations are
critical to the persona or the habitus (bourdieu says) of anyone who isn't
trying to be andrew lloyd weber (greetings to andy if he's lurking)

it's not that the wicked ways of the world are natural or to be accepted

it's just that the force of poetry is like the force of a question
to me - poetry is from a question to a question - that's where it goes

not necessarily oppositional but the kind of world it would run?
not tonight josephine

if horses were wishes ...
if poets were legislators ...
shall we ask vaclav havel about this? - he must be the world expert now

... remember when bugs starts climbing up the hole and he seems to be taking
forever because
little does he know NASA has whacked a great big rocket ship about to blast off
on top of the hutch and
on his way he says the hole sure is long today - i'll never mix carrot juice and
radish juice again - and when he gets
to the top of the rocket and unscrews the lid, now well in outer space - he's
just saying
no wonder i'm so slee...peeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!
because the minute he's got the lid off he's carried away by a comet or suchlike

i'll omit the rest of the story... but that's all i ask of a poem really
to give me the wake up call

but right now i'm getting sleepy
and i am doomed for a certain time to tread where marvin (the martian as well as
the android) hold sway with the rest of the legislators

i'll skip the angels and ministers of grace for the nonce
may the powers of poetry defend us!


Christopher Kelen,
English Dept, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities,
University of Macau, Taipa, Macao SAR, CHINA



>& the old ways will remain strong, as the audience for authors remains
>strong, it seems, as well as for their 'straight,' & traditional
>representations of feelings of the self...

Yes, Doug. But let's not forget that Poetry, in its institutional
expressions, has played a central role in consolidating such ideological
expectations.

Thus, my question: How can poets begin to effectively *poeticize the
institutional structures of ideology*, rather than merely accept them as
natural and beyond poetry's aim?




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Subject: Levina's door/ collaboration/ ideology




Christopher,

Just offering some markedly tentative thoughts and opinions. Don't know why
the legislating finger-wag.

But thank you for reminding me about reality inside the republic walls.

I don't know what you mean by your half-remembered remark on Benjamin and
fascism. Could you elaborate?

Kent
----------

Christopher Kelen wrote:

Kent
          are you after legislator acknowledgement??
where would that lead ? once inside the walls of the republic please
remember
that among other things there are to be no sweet sauces, no Athenian
confectionary and no Corinthian girlfriends ...

didn't walter benjamin have question like this: the aetheticisation of the
political v. the politicisation of the aesthetic ... and one was fascism and
i
can't remember now...

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