Hi Claire

My froth was partly fever-driven, but now the antibiotics are kicking in
I promise to try to make some sense.

>Your recoil from Official Poet reminds me of my recoil from Official Poems -
>as in Officially Good Poems - don't you find that trying to define/label
>poems as wellas poets stultifies the very thing in one that is looking out
>for a poem?

Yes, for me, anyway. I have several very contradictory responses to all
that - of course I discriminate between different poems, and prefer some
over others, and have my reasons for doing so (whether they are justified
or not is somehow beside the point). Nevertheless, whenever I hear
people debating what makes a "good" poem I want to run away. The live,
feeling intelligence of poetry is something which doesn't go too well
with "10 ways to write a poem" or the kinds of pointers you get in books
for screenwriters, nor does it fit ideological/movement driven dividings,
which are often all too crude and limiting. There's something that
happens when I read Lorca or HD or Montale or Prynne or Ritsos or
Dickinson (or all those others) and it happens inside me and it's not
really expressible except by the poem itself: and all these words _about_
that experience are, in a way, a waste of time, since all that matters is
the poem itself. Though of course I wouldn't blather on so much if I
didn't enjoy those speculations. It's just that they always seem
inadequate and partial.

But the game of theorising does carry that danger of talking yourself
into a corner, or out of the poem altogether, when poetry itself just
walks through the wall. A poem can be met freshly, but sometimes it
needs the grime of expectation scraped off it, the labels you mention,
and that can be a hard, maybe sometimes an impossible task. But you can
have those moments, when a poem escapes the patina of a subsequently
over-written "beauty" or a prejudice of non-understanding and comes to
life - I remember reading Keats once and suddenly understanding that
these poems were almost too painful to read - too real -

And I guess that quality, which I am not describing because I don't feel
capable of it, (Candice called it the anarchy within a poem in a post a
while back) is what is faces abashment within
consumerist/corporate/authoritarian ideologies, whatever forces that
require that a human being be malleable to exterior manipulations, that
he or she be divested of a self which might say "no" or "yes", or might
question or demand or think or feel. Why, according to Paz, bourgeois
society "hates poetry". The artist in community can be part of that
abashment - a legitimising and taming of an activity which otherwise
might be dangerously useless - but it certainly need not be.

I've no idea if this answers any of your questions - I'm still a little
vague, I'm afraid -

Best

Alison