----- Original Message -----
From: "Alison Croggon" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 23 October 2001 10:52
Subject: Re: Poem
| Ugly words for ugly times.
Ha! Reminds me of the Genesis P Orridge line "Industrial music for
industrial people" (which a Berliner told me was an actual DDR slogan; but
*he said
everything with a straight face so one could never be sure
| Which brings me to a serious point: which is, if one is questioning public
| speech in the crude ways I am in that poem, by quoting and exaggerating
| (only slightly as it happens), how does one avoid the faults of that
speech
| being the faults of the poem?
The trouble is that the language itself is faulty. One may get spectacular
effects from
reworking language used in good faith even though it's muddled or... even
though it's
being misused. I'm thinking, say, of Mamet
But the kind of language that you are looking at, Alison, has been
denatured.
However much of it you hold back, it won't grow - *may not, this is only a
suspicion; and I'm interested in attempts to make it useful to poetry
& I suspect my suspicion; because such a line of thought will go straight
down the neo-platonic superhighway if I'm not careful
Our language resonates with metaphorical overtones and undertones, not just
in high declarations of love but in everyday data transfers; and much
language
abuse works with (i.e. against) the tones and echoes of our words as a kind
of dialoge or counterpoint
But when the language gets newspeaked, it may be unuseable, at least in the
kind of form that you were using. Formal innovation may get round the
problem, but then perhaps you have lost simplicity and familiarity - what I
did like about your poem, Alison, was its directness
L
|