I think Todd is no longer among us. I did check out his website--all hype,
a lot of quotes from folks I've never heard of about his being god's gift
to this or that, and looking further (not the website--nothing for free
there) I managed to find a couple of very uninteresting poems that may play
well at slams. I think we're talking about a balloon flying on its own gas.
Who knows? Someday he may be governor of California.
Mark
At 08:14 AM 10/7/2003 -0700, Alison Croggon wrote:
>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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