Good points, Alison. Yes, the critique of po-biz in all its manifestations perhaps has to build on something more profound than the mask of an ideal audience at the Sorbonne, well-trained in all the exempla of 2000 years of texts. Frederick's poem and your notion of "pleasure" both seem to emphasize something unique to poetry. I wonder if deep down it has to do with Romance, or the Romantics - the idea that rationalist prose modernity has lost something fundamental in the process of freeing the mind from the archaic collectivity of oral memory. This is the hidden war between prose and poetry. The 20th-cent. poetry wars, and the bizarre academic cottage industries stemming from them, aired so cleverly on the Buffalo list, are perhaps merely a theater of that bigger war.
I think music has something to do, not with local holy relics and chauvinist pride, nor with inhuman logics of power, but with latitudes and forests. Poetry has its root in wilderness life, going back beyond Descartes and Renaissance and even Rome - something elusive foggy Celtic Siberian & primitive. Of course the music of order and the order of music are used to justify all forms of state and society, so there's something subrational and dangerous (or merely pathetic) in such enthusiasms. But I'm trying to understand my own stubborn allegiance to poetry vs. prose, and vs. so many other practical things. I am sure the momentum of my own inertia will keep my mind trying to bind together such disparate elements as the frightening shamanic power (feared by other tribes) of the Ojibwa forest songs, on the one hand, and the logic of universal religious humanism on the other. Help me, St. Walt & San Francisco; shrive me, Sts. TS & Simone; be with me, Sts. David J. & Hart C. !
I know it's only storytellers, trying to do justice to what they've experienced & seen & known. Epiphanies. Dante, flying over the earth, looking down at the minuscule straw of po-biz.
Henry
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