Marcus
you have used deliberately sexualised and obscene language in your response
to Alison's arguments - golden showers, crap, courtesan, masturbation
....and out of it produce a debased crude version of what she has argued
that I don't even recognise. Your objection seems to be something visceral
to do with her defence of feeling and the physical. It seems to me that your
argument collapses in the welter of its own excessive imagery and refusal to
respond to what has been said.
Liz
> -----Original Message-----
> From: British & Irish poets [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On
> Behalf Of Marcus Bales
> Sent: Friday, May 23, 2003 2:12 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Alison's egocentric poetics
>
>
> On 22 May 2003 at 15:06, Alison Croggon wrote:
> > ... Where are your qualifications?
> > With what authority do you speak? What _allows_ you the validity of
> > your own feelings? All I can hear in those questions is the voice of
> > the thought police.<<
>
> This is fleeing where no man pursueth, isn't it? The authority of the
> poet's voice is earned by the poet making meaning -- not by the poet
> blurting out any old random crap uncritically held to be valuable by
> the poet merely because it is his own, or her own, golden shower of
> words. The poet must earn the authority of his or her voice by
> providing something valuable to the reader, something the reader does
> NOT bring to the poem.
>
> > ... Marcus' refusal, for instance, to allow that
> > "feeling" or the place of the body in art has any intellectual
> > validity, which reflects a long held prejudice of Western art. <<
>
> This is ascribing to me a great deal more than I've said -- or hold.
> I don't say that feeling or the place of the body in art lacks
> intellectual validity -- I say that the poet has to provide
> intellectual, emotional, spiritual validity in the poem -- not merely
> as a brand-name into which readers may read anything they please
> (reading Frost as a liberal feminist, I suppose, or Ai as a macho
> man), or regarding the poem as an empty vessel into which they can
> pour their own concerns and claim that the poet speaks to them when
> they're only speaking to themselves.
>
> Perhaps there is a use in the self-help section of the bookstore for
> texts that allow people to pour their own concerns into such empty
> vessels and speak to themselves and, thus, help themselves -- but why
> should we call it poetry?
>
> > Well,
> > rather than a legislative approach to "judgment" of works of art,
> > which is inevitably reductive, I prefer an erotics of art: something
> > Sontag suggested as a possibility 40 years ago, and Rukeyser outlined
> > in the 50s in her own polemics. That is, an approach which permits
> > responsiveness, rather than privileging a grid of received ideas.<
>
> Well, because even a courtesan has to start with some received ideas,
> such as the bodies involved in eros. You seem to envisage the erotic
> as two people each masturbating in front of pictures of one another:
> the poet involved with pleasing him- or herself and the reader
> involved with pleasing him- or herself each without any engagement
> with the other because the poet doesn't care if there are readers or
> if those readers perceive anything even remotely resembling the good
> time he or she had writing the poem, and the readers don't care what
> good time the poet may have had, nor do they care if the poet meant
> anything, the readers just have a good time bringing their purely
> external-to-the-poem experiences up out of their memories and
> enjoying those.
>
> Marcus Bales
>
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> http://www.designerglass.com
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