Alison Croggon:
> And when did I claim my poetry was "good"?

You claim that your poems are good when you show them to anyone but
your mother -- when you show them to anyone whose unconditional
approval you cannot depend on. By showing your poems to anyone but
your mother you are making an explicit claim on others' time and
attention -- a claim that is only valid if you think that your poems
are worthy of that time and attention.  Those who don't think their
poems are worthy of that time and attention ought to keep them to
themselves.

Alison:
> Definitive answers in relation to poetry bore me stupid; and are
> misleading in relation to art in general - art has never been about
> providing "answers". <<

No, but criticism is about providing reasonable frameworks in which
to react to art -- and your "erotics of poetry" is so far entirely
unreasonable because you refuse to do any more than wave the words
like a wand as if merely by saying them over and over you can turn a
logical fallacy into a truth.

Alison Croggon:
> ... Your
> questions reveal a set of assumptions about poetry which seem to be
> based on notions of legitimacy and authority (what "counts" as a
> poem? what is a non-poem? what is "good" what is "bad"?). <<

I'm asking what YOU think makes this or that poem good or bad; what
makes this or that a poem at all while something else is not one? I'm
asking for an explanation of YOUR sense of legitimacy, for YOUR
authority.

Allison Croggon:
> I am
> suggesting that these questions are of limited interest if what you
> want to do is to read, enjoy and understand poetry, and that they are
> questions which do not interest me at all, that they distort the
> encounter with a poem.  That doesn't mean that I am an indiscriminate
> reader; it means that in my reading I hold true to my subjectivity,
> which is in fact the only thing that I have.  Whether this is of
> interest to anybody else or not depends on how interesting my
> responses are.  I don't have to "prove" anything, and I'm not
> interested in "proving" anything.<<

Ordinarily it is schizophrenics and other mentally ill people do
nothing but hold true to their subjectivity because it's all they
have, not poets. What the non-mentally-ill, and poets, have is
something beyond that -- a sense of place and standing among others,
and the ability to do more than embrace their own sheer and
unadulterated subjectivity. Mere subjectivity is not enough to
establish something as art. If subjectivity is really all one has
got, then one hasn't got enough to make art. Without a context, a
culture, an audience, without a claim that what you're doing is good
enough to be worthy of the audience's time and effort, how does one
distinguish one's own subjectivity from the subjectivity of the
mentally ill?

Alison Croggon:
> Crucial to the whole idea of an erotics is the idea that a reader
> encounters each particular poem in a specific place and time, and the
> responsiveness to the poem depends on the specifics of both the poem
> and the reader (after all, you can have different responses to the
> same poem at different times).  Particularity and specifics, rather
> than generalities and desensitised expectations.<<

But this begs the question, Alison: what's a poem to begin with? How
do you distinguish a poem from a non-poem? Is anything a poem that a
"reader" says it is?  Is one thing a poem at one time and a non-poem
at another depending on the reader's response to it?

Alison Croggon:
> ... But maybe what bothers you more than my lack of interest in
> definitive answers is the implication that there is no "authority"
> within that response, except whatever authority it generates on its
> own subjective terms - if I say a poem affects me in a particular
> way, no one can tell me that it doesn't; they can only tell me that
> it doesn't affect them that way.  And if they are intelligent, they
> will say why, and that might further illuminate my own response.<<

If one reads a Hallmark greeting card and is deeply moved one might
imagine a variety of reasons for that being so, but I doubt very much
that it would be the authority the greeting card generated on its own
subjective terms!  It would be a matter of the reader's subjective
terms, not the greeting card's, it seems to me.

At first you're arguing that the reader's subjective response is all
that's important; then you immediately contradict that by saying that
another reader's response might illuminate your response.  It seems
to me that the moment you allow that another reader's intelligent and
articulated response might illuminate your own, you are allowing that
there is, indeed, authority beyond any reader's own subjective
response. You can't have it both ways, Alison. If any reader's
subjective response is all that's important then it's entirely
unreasonable that any other reader's response, however intelligent or
articulate, would have any impact at all on, much less illuminate,
that initial reader's response.  But, if intelligent and articulate
responses to poems can indeed illuminate other readers' responses,
then you cannot escape that there is authority other than a reader's
subjective response.

Marcus Bales

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