Mark
I take your points, all of them, & agree the poem is far too generalized (&
does not represent Page at her best).
BUT:
>
>3. One must have absolute loyalty to the practice. As poets it's what we
>live and die by, and we don't have much else to hang on to. Any poem that
>shirks that responsibility is an affront to all of us. Worth getting hot
>under the collar about. Chill out if you don't really care.
With such a loyalty, our only choice in this matter is to not get involved.
Or just do our best at the local level, by getting some good poets to come
out & read locally, where the bureaucratic demands won't be felt. As I &
others have argued, it seems more than likely that what was wanted was a
'nice,' general, poem that wouldn't offend anyone (except perhaps some
poets who 'have absolute loyalty to the practice' -- the one group they're
not too worried about. As your choices showed, & many of them I'd say
hurrah to, the poems we might want won't fit into the box set up by the UN.
How many of us on this list sent in poems (our own or some other we liked)
for Hacker to choose? (I admit I thought she was chosen to choose, but had
been given the go-ahead to choose from her own personal 'archive'.)
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
(h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
surely when they fell
it was into grace
bpNichol
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