> I am not saying that poets should stop using their names, and I've made
this
> clear in a number of published statements; I'm saying that poetry is
perhaps
> in the days of Kitty Hawk, and other forms of flight haven't begun to be
> glimpsed. There will be lots of pilots who will be immolated in tests of
new
> vehicles, powered by weird fuels. It's an exciting time.
Kent
what strikes me, and very contingently, is that however many ways you twist
it, poets will always be saddled with their selves. This does not preclude
multiple identities, nor does it proscribe anonymity, but whatever tactics a
poet will use they will always be the hosts for their questionable,
problematic selves. You almost strike me as someone who thinks they have
found a 'fix', I could totally agree with critiques of the presentation of
self as a bourgeiose apparatus that is validated by recognition, except
that, whatever theoretical stances one might take, Thos Hardy's or John
Clare's will be.
'I' am as real/unreal as any other 'I', and my temporary presence is the one
true home I know in this world. Pessoa's dialectic dramatisations of the
crystalline self were, as Alison quite rightly indicated, children of
Shakespeare, and in that extensions of the dramatic to the lyric 'I', but
they're not blueprints for a dissociation of identity, too, I cannot believe
in a notion of linear progress in the arts, the quality can exist, but
surely only in relative, time-bounded terms.
Best
Dave
----- Original Message -----
From: "kent johnson" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, July 16, 2001 3:31 PM
Subject: Poetic theater/ flight tests (reply to Alison)
> Alison,
>
> Thanks for the response. Let me point out, please, how you misread me.
>
> It's not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with the conventional
> name stamp, no more than there is anything really wrong with the photos of
> the company's actors in the foyer. It's just that such stampings mark a
> *productive horizon* beyond which certain imaginative moves cannot be made
> and certain (mostly undisovered, no doubt) imaginative dimensions cannot
be
> entered. Hyper-authorsip, as I argue in an interview forthcoming this
fall,
> does not supplant, it *adds*. It's an aperture, a tunneling, hinted at by
> Pessoa, barely touched since.
>
> Now, I understand that conventional attributional forms can also be
> productive, even psychically propulsive, for some (Henry Gould is an
> unusually interesting case, Narcissus purposely drowning himself into his
> reflection to see what's on the other side), but for the vast majority of
> poets (this is indisputable, it seems to me) self-inscription inside an
> institutionalized mode of production/distribution/reception is made
without
> a thought, as if it were the law of nature, or something. And this is
> ideology powerfully working, of course.
>
> I am not saying that poets should stop using their names, and I've made
this
> clear in a number of published statements; I'm saying that poetry is
perhaps
> in the days of Kitty Hawk, and other forms of flight haven't begun to be
> glimpsed. There will be lots of pilots who will be immolated in tests of
new
> vehicles, powered by weird fuels. It's an exciting time.
>
> By the way, my "toast"/Author conceit in last post was not meant to
suggest
> champagne-- I meant the toast that pops out of the toaster!
>
> Kent
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