On Fri, 6 Jul 2001 11:23:54 +1000, [log in to unmask] wrote:

>Erminia:
>
>>You have good reason to criticize my attacks on this particular issue ,
>>though, since I am always on the verge of sounding too dogmatic. You are
>>right in what you say about the first person narrative voice. It could be
>>seen as the only desperate thing remaining, in a desolate world of ones
own.
>
>Yes, and I quite understand your objections. I was reading Aime Cesaire
>recently, his wonderful and angry long poem On Returning to my Native
>Land. Cesaire says:
>
>"Again, an objection! only one, let it be only one: I have no right to
>assess life by this black hand;s span; to reduce myself to this little
>ellisoidal nothing trembling four finger above the line ..."
>
>and then makes himself huge, the voice of all oppressed black men:
>
>"My name is Bordeaux and Nantes and Liverpool and New York and San
>Francisco
>not a corner of the world but carries my thumbprint
>
>...
>
>This man is mine
>a man alone, imprisoned by
>whiteness
>a man alone defying the white
>cries of a white death"
>
>and then moves to a we:
>
>"We, vomit of the slave-ship,
>We, hunted meat of Calabar..."
>
>And then back to a wholly transcendant I, which embraces all the inner
>psychical prohibitions which manacle his race, the chains, inner and
>outer, of European colonialism, in an ecstatic apocalyptic vision which
>reaches towards a vision of human (fraternal) love. It's a magnificent
>poem, but deeply problematic, not only because of the problems it
>addresses - being written in French, for example, the language of the
>oppressor -
>
>Perhaps what is most notable for me is that the we - which rightly, given
>what it is, excludes whites - also excludes women. This is a "we" very
>much of its time - 1939 - and that possibility, as all the grand
>narratives of socialism, communism etc have crumbled has now fragmented
>into innumerable singular stories of despair.
>
>There's a possible hint towards something different here:
>
>"Hannah Arendt saw that capacity for interplay to be the quality of the
>polis - a site where we can meet each other as equals, while recognising
>our diversity, and taking the preservation of that diversity as the very
>purpose of our meeting... How can this be achieved (How can we achieve
>it?) Through making sure our separate identities stop short of
>exclusivity, of a refusal to cohabit with other identities; this in turn
>requires abandoning the tendency to suppress other identities in the name
>of self assertion of one's own, while accepting, on the contrary, that it
>is precisely the guarding of other identities that maintains the
>diversity in which one's own uniqueness can thrive."
>
>(Zygmunt Bauman, Unity in Diversity)
>
>Of course, he stops short of a traditional "we" there.
>
>Best
>
>Alison

Dear Alison, you have excellent reasons to cite these lines by Aime Cesaire
. The role of the poet as a megaphone of the people’ s protests,
sufferings, rights or those of an overwhelmed nation, with the consequent
use of the personal pronoun " we " it is desirable if not absolutely
necessary and unavoidable, especially in the case of those texts bearing a
political and sociological significance in the deepest sense of the term.
To this function of poetry I do not only acclaim credibility and authority,
but indeed I support it and I applaud it like indispensable and useful.

Moreover, in commemorative poems, when the evoked “other” is dead or
absent, or prevented in uttering his/her poetical self in the most
elementary verbal expression - as in the case of those poems written in
defence of the animal condition, of which it is a excellent example Mark
Doty’s sonnet " Golden Retrievals " – then yes (even though Doty’s poem is
also a funny example of the right of the dog- narrator to promote his
own “self” . And in fact the poem - written from the dog’s perspective-
carefully avoids the use of “we” and creates instead a sort of alienation
of the narrative voice from that of the too meditative, depressive figure
of the owner. )

But when poems are love poems, then I prefer the disconsolate first person
singular of a Dante, a Petrarch, a Leopardi... the contemplative “ you ",
the sentimental anguish, the mystical meditation of the other, ,,,ect.

 I presume that the problem arises from the fact that in the last 4
decades, Anglophone poetry, from Philip Larkin on, has granted credibility
mainly to the tamed narrative voice of the good citizen (who is allowed to
be “strange” or “eccentric” only in a measure that does not exceed that of
all the others).

So one can be a poet, but with the burden of a commonly shared vicissitude
within the shared urban borders of cohabitation, say with a
certain “decency” and within the bourgeois system... Therefore, when in
these kind of domesticated circumstances it is one of the two in the
couple (male or woman that is) to hold the power of the " pen ", then
it makes a megaphone of his mouth proclaiming " we " not for real
sentimental reasons, I presume, but not to be kicked out the house by his /
her partner and being considered an attention seeker.