Joe and David B wrote:
><<Otherwise I might do something really stupid: like caring for people.>>
>
>If I may be permitted to climb down from the high ironic mode for a moment,
>surely THIS is why we have selves. Without the ethical self, poetry
>becomes--what?--a game of language. (Not a "language game," which is defined
>by a human situation.)
Which makes me think of Muriel Rukeyser, whose commitment to the human
must surely be beyond question, talking of form and other things:
"It's difficult to make the equivalence of an experience, to make a poem
that is so full of the resources of music and of meaning, and that allows
you to give it to me, me to give it to you. All the forms of art come to
us in their own ways and allow us to make more forms, and to make this
exchange. ... I think the exchange of energy is what happens in art.
There are so many ways in which one is conducted to learning, so many
ways in which one seeks, and ways in which one loves the people from whom
one can learn. The passion with which one reaches to such people goes on
forever and ever; it is in one's own poems, and in the poems one reads..."
Best
Alison
|