At 11:31 AM +0100 24/5/03, david.bircumshaw wrote:
>it can be that a view of poetry as being founded on the erotic can have
>right-wing implications (I hasten to add I'm not saying Alison's do) while
>also a view of poetry as a socially engineered process can have a
>dehumanising tendency, as do industrial processes.
It seems to me nonsensical to claim that eroticism in poetry is per
se anything on a political spectrum; surely it's as various as human
beings. Paz locates Sade's libertinage as the genesis of commodified
sexuality, the acme of contemporary corporatisation, which reaches
its logical end in cyber pornography, erasing the body altogether in
a transaction which doesn't even involve real money; though he says
that Sade's aristocratic sensibility would have been horrified by the
democratising of the libertine. The commodification of sex, or the
portrayal of sexuality as always an exercise of power - the
insistence, for example, that rape is "hard wired" into the
aggressive and territorial male brain - seem always to be linked to
other right wing ideas, like the necessary subjugation of inferior
races. On the other hand, Muriel Rukeyser, throughout her life a
left wing activist, wrote countless erotic poems - poems about birth,
love, the physical life - all mitigating against the un-life of war
and destruction - as she says
Whoever despises the clitoris despises the penis
Whoever despises the penis despises the cunt
Whoever despises the cunt despises the life of the child.
However, to locate eroticism on a binary of right and left seems to
mitigate against its essential complexity and contradictoriness.
It's like saying that language is right wing.
best
A
--
Alison Croggon
Editor, Masthead
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
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