At 9:26 AM -0400 21/5/03, Marcus Bales wrote:
>So, you have criteria you use to judge whether your work is good or
>not that are not applicable to other poets -- what are those
>criteria?

Dear Marcus

I find myself in a peculiar position - on the one hand Erminia is
complaining that I speak of nothing but my own poetry, and on the
other you are complaining that I refuse to explain my poetry.  I
assume that you don't find in what I have already said an implicit
poetics or practice, although in many ways I think I have answered
your questions already.  I have already said, for example, what I
enjoy about a poem, and what I don't enjoy.

The reason I prefer to refer you to the essays on my website (which I
assume you haven't bothered to read) is that I dislike the whole
notion of "explaining" my poems, as if I were writing an apologia.  I
am interested in the processes and the impulses of writing, and in
fact of all arts, and I have always enjoyed talking to artists about
how they do what they do; but to construct a theory of value in which
I place my own poetry as "good"  is, for me, extremely problematic.
It feels fraudulent, and at worst it falsifies and at best it is
incidental to whatever happens when I am actually writing poems.

I don't know what you mean by "getting it out" and "getting it
across".  I don't think reading poems is a matter of having meaning
conveyed to you, like a fridge in a box, which is then unpacked and
set functioning; poetry is uncommodifiable.  It is a much more subtle
and fluid process of illuminations, both immediate and patient, which
accompany a time of cohabiting, of living with, a poem.  It is full
of doubts and hesitancies and pleasures and ephemeral responses, as
is any relationship.  And in the end it is underpinned by love.  The
poems which are important to me are poems I love.  I love them not
because they are "good" but because, in an infinity of ways, they
speak to my own temporality, my own humanity.  I have always thought,
since I was a child, that the only reason beauty matters to human
beings is because they are mortal.

But perhaps you do not recognise my answers as answers, which makes
dialogue impossible and somewhat boorish. As another possible answer,
I'll paste below a passage from a novel-in-progress in which my dead
hero, Amoroso, who is in a place which resembles Dostoevsky's vision
of eternity as a bathhouse full of spiders, meditates on his task of
writing.

"But again I digress.  O my God, You Who do not exist, but to Whose
sublime absence, nevertheless, I direct these pathetic words, so
inadequate to their task of adumbrating the anatomy of a single human
soul: how am I to describe anything?  I ask You this in all humility:
for if it is true that You are the Word, which may be but a creation
of the human accident of the larynx, lips, palate, tongue and breath
twisted together into expressiveness by the mind, which as we all
know tends towards darkness, possessing alone of the animal kingdom
the unfortunate knowledge that darkness is its ultimate destination,
then You of anyone will understand how grammar only seems orderly,
and is in fact an illusory straightening of the welter of impressions
and perceptions which flood our carnal presence in this world, and
bears as much and as little symmetry with the real as a butterfly
killed and dried and pinned does to the live creature dancing its
broken dance in a shaft of sunlight in the middle of a lush and
living glade.  And it may be that my writing may seem rather the
butterfly broken on an axle, its wings perished and dusted of all
their marvellous colours, its intricate veinings smashed beyond
recognition.  And perforce, it may be that I should merely limit
myself to the listing of events; but events so listed, however they
lift the hair from the neck, are only the outer garments of despair.
The inner anatomies: these are the difficulties.  If one takes a
sword, for example, and slices off the top of a man's head, thereby
exposing the brain, all that expressive spouting of blood and matter
will give no clue to anything but the violence of the gesture of
penetration: one cannot look into a man's mind through the uncivil
exposing of its parts.  The mind is a whole thing, animated by a
single force, however splintered and partial it may seem; and when it
is deprived of that binding animation, it is nothing.  Even so, I
cannot but wonder in my present situation if death is absolute; in
the jungle it seems everything is alive, the dead perhaps even more
than the living: corpses are quivering bags of maggots within half a
day, and even the rocks seem sentient, part of some huge half
somnolent organism which is this world, and which we, as human
beings, only barely understand.  Cleanliness, being the human body
stripped of all that might remind it of its putrefaction, is the
nearest we might reach to divinity, and is therefore very far from
me, writing by the light of a tallow with my hand grimed with sweat
and my rich bodily odours colouring the pure air with my own death."

Perhaps, on the other hand, you prefer cleanliness.

best

A
--


Alison Croggon

Editor, Masthead
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/

Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/