At 6:19 PM +0100 6/10/03, Todd Swift wrote:
>Finally, let me say that politically-engaged poetic activism must remain a
>private choice, but that the role of the poet (Write it!) is ultimately
>public - as Plato knew. To pretend the poems we write stay in the drawer,
>to be burn on our deathbeds is unfair to our actual intentions. We may not
>expect TV coverage of a sonnet, but we do put our work into the world.
I misread this as "put our world into the work", which maybe says
more about how I think about it all. And when was I doing the purist
thing? I publish my work, and I like to think that people might read
it. It's just that when it comes down to it, that's a secondary
question for me - as a _writer_, if not as a reader. At a particular
moment of crisis, many moons ago now, I realised that I would still
write poems if I was on a desert island and I knew for sure that
nobody would ever read them.
I did say a poem on television once, it was excruciating. If I
thought that was the point I'd be shredding it all now.
And yes, it's such an old argument, and I don't feel like rehearsing
it all the way through Sartre and everyone else, or naming all those
poets who became communists or whatever and then existed very
uncomfortably with it, or who have been victims of the very
ideologies they believed in. And yes, I've done my bit for paw too,
but not because I thought that writing poems would change anything,
but because it seemed to me that even the little public profile poets
have is enough of a platform to raise a voice, and in some
circumstances raising a voice is better than remaining silent and
counting as consent.
I don't know Patricia Smith, but I think that those other poets you
mentioned would object to be railroaded into a slogan. Political
engagement of various kinds seems to me much more and much more
complicated than "marching under banners" and may explicitly refuse
such lockstep. I think you are having a bit of a problem with your
conflations of the terms of "political engagement" with those of
"marketing".
Best
A
--
Alison Croggon
Blog
http://alisoncroggon.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
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