The main point I wanted to make in my previous message about the
naughty-naughtying of David Bircumshaw seems to have gotten lost in the
shuffle, so here it is again.

The policy statement for this list which we all receive by email when we
join, and which is always accessible at
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/files/POETRYETC/POETRYETC.WELCOME, tells us:

>>As an unmoderated private discussion list, Poetryetc has few rules, >>
>>but subscribers are expected to adhere to the following principles and
>>practices:

>>1. No personal abuse
>>2. No bigotry..."

The statement makes no further definition of these terms and no
qualification that the list managers are authorized to define what
constitutes bigotry or abuse. It does say that the list is unmoderated (it
refers to list "managers" rather than "moderators") and has "few rules."
Taking all this together, I don't see how the statement can mean anything
but that what is being prohibited is abuse and bigotry in the obvious,
everyday sense of the term which anyone would recognize: gross direct
personal insult or grossly racist or other prejudiced language. Think
about it: this interpretation is perfectly justified by the language of the
policy statement and is the only one possible which doesn't depend on
potentially conflicting personal redefinitions of what is abusive. If the
intention is to use a less obvious definition, why isn't is there in the
policy statement? Or if the statement means "bigotry and abuse as defined
by the list managers," then why isn't that specified?

This being the case, I think it is unconscionable for the list managers to
enforce, Humpty-Dumpty like, definitions of these words which mean what they
want them to mean. It can't be argued that their definitions are the ones
which any reasonable person would accept, since several reasonable people
have in fact sent messages objecting to them. And there's no justification
for claiming that it's part of the list managers' job to impose their
personal definition of abuse on the rest of us, since the list policy
statement doesn't say it is.

The guidelines as they stand very clearly prohibit statements like "John Doe
is an idiot" or "John Doe is ugly as a pimple on a horny toad's ass" or
"John Doe wanks off to his autographed glossy color photo of Pauline Hansen"
  (unless of course it has been publicly established that Mr. Doe actually
does this.) These are types of statements which everyone can agree without
quibbling are abusive, and they really are the only types of statements we
need to exclude in order to maintain dialogue which is frank yet civil. For
the list managers to intervene to prohibit certain types of discourse on the
basis of their own personal definitions of abuse, however ingeniously argued
for, will inevitably have a chilling effect on our dialogue by leaving all
of us in doubt as to how honestly we are going to be allowed to express
ourselves.

--------------------------------------------------
I'm certain I saw a book of bad reviews of subsequently famous authors some
years ago, but I can't remember the title or compiler, and a quick search in
on line bibliographies hasn't turned it up. Maybe Gabriel Gudding should
ask around to see if anyone can identify it before embarking on his own
project. (I can, however, identify a similar book done for music: Lexicon
of Musical Invective by Nicolas Slonimsky.)

--------------------------------------------------
Hardy's "The Ruined Maid" is an old favorite of mine, but seeing it again
cited here suggested some new ironies to me. The piece has the unmistakable
accents of the most vulgar Victorian parlor poetry -- things like "The Old
Arm-Chair" or "Oh No, We Never Mention Her." The main function of such
poems was to provide the masses with an opportunity for indulging in the
celebration of bourgeois sentimentality under cover of moral uplift; hence
Hardy is being considerably clever in casting his defense (ok there should
be quote marks around defense) of prostitution in this mode. Also, if you
simply substituted something like "wed well" for "ruined," the poem would
still make perfect sense as a story and as a class analysis of a poor woman
who had landed a rich husband, which can hardly be an accident.

[Philological query: in the lines "At home in the barton you said 'thee'
and 'thou,'
And 'thik oon,' and 'theäs oon,' and 't'other'" is it possible to identify a
regional origin for the accent? I know "thee" "thou" and "t'other" could be
from lots of places, but "thik oon" and "theas oon" sound rarer.]

--------------------------------------------------
MacLeish's dictum that "a poem should not mean but be" has, I think, been
often misunderstood. It seems to me quite simply a reaction against the
naive approach to poetry which assumes that a poem has an extractable prose
paraphrase which is what the poem "really means." This goes back to the
ancient theory that poetry should be "dulce et utile," the charm of the
sound and rhetoric being the dulce part, which is the sugar-coating, and the
extractable moral lesson which the poem teaches being the utile part, which
is the "real meaning." I think everyone today would agree that poetry
shouldn't be approached that way.

But this is not at all the same thing as saying that a poem can have no
legitimate reference to anything outside its own language. Every poem, if
it has meaning, refers to an action which it represents, since that act of
representation is what the poem's meaning consists of. (Obviously this is
from the Poetics; Aristotle was talking in terms of tragedy, but since
tragedy is for him the most fully realized form of poetry, his analysis of
it is really an analysis of poetry itself.)

Take what might seem at first an unpromising example: William Carlos
William's "The Red Wheelbarrow," which is too well known to need quoting.
Can this be an imitation of an action? Yes: the action is the sudden
perception of an ordinary scene which becomes epiphanic by the sheer impact
of the intensity of existence of its surfaces, and the poem's form and
mechanics imitate that process of perception. Or so it seems to me. (The
poem also has intellectual content because of what this implies about the
importance of things in themselves, but you might not realize this unless
you knew about the poet's aesthetic theories from elsewhere.) In poetry,
meaning is mimesis.

--------------------------------------------------
Rebecca Seiferle writes, "There are very few poems, because of the erasure
of women, of female desire, in which the woman is the subject rather than
the object." True enough, but here's a monkey-wrench: the best and most
famous lyric poems which have survived from ancient Greece, those of Sappho,
are exactly such poems. This is a spanner in the ideological works because
this woman poet, far from being erased, was exalted to the pantheon of their
greatest poets by one of the most intensely male centered cultures which has
appeared on earth.

How to explain, I wonder, that those Ur-patriarchalists, the ancient Greeks,
considered Sappho one of their greatest poets, and ranked some half dozen
other women poets as minor but excellent? That's a record that compares
favorably with most other societies of the past. Adding to the perplexity
is the fact that Sappho's poetry in subject and viewpoint is strikingly
female -- it's impossible that the Greeks could have considered her to be as
good a poet as a man because she made poetry that was like a man's, because
she didn't. Sappho's poetry today is generally agreed to be grounded in a
female consciousness, but I'm not aware that anyone has tried to explain why
then her poetry should have been so enormously esteemed and celebrated by a
society in which normative literary taste was so thoroughly grounded in male
consciousness. I'm not sure what this proves, though my mentioning it will
probably prove that in the current cultural climate no man can say anything
about women as poets without getting into trouble.

But what the hell, I haven't been the target of much invective lately, so I
might as well continue.

Samuel Butler theorized that a woman wrote The Odyssey, and Robert Graves
agreed with him, at least for the purpose of writing a novel. If they were
right, then two of the Greeks' greatest poets will have been women. I don't
think they were right, but there's a deeper truth here: The Odyssey as a
domestic epic could be seen as a female counterpoint to the great warrior
epic. And come to think of it, it's easier to imagine a woman than a man
conveying the edgy undercurrents of the aftermath relationship between
Menelaos and Helen, or managing to portray the vivacious nubility of
Nausicaa without a trace of lechery. And in the great reunion scene, which
I sometimes think is the finest thing in literature, we seem to be looking
carefully at Odysseus the whole time, which implies that we're seeing it
from Penelope's viewpoint.

Robert Graves incidentally writes somewhere that women made a different kind
of poetry from men, one which, if it was true poetry, spoke with a unique
ancient authority. He also said that "In Memoriam" was inevitably a failed
poem because "a muse does not wear whiskers."

--------------------------------------------------
For thousands of years one of the main themes of poetry was what it meant to
be a man. Today one of the main themes of poetry is what it means to be a
woman, but the mere idea of a poem about what it means to be a man is
laughable. When I try to think of a contemporary example all I can come up
with is "The Ballad of the Green Berets." Meanwhile, as women poets are
fumblingly but sincerely trying to construct valid representations of female
desire, it's men poets who have lapsed into silence about male desire.
Consider Spenser's "Epithalium," maybe the greatest articulation of male
erotic desire ever made. Today that poem seems like it might as well be
Martian from the standpoint of a culture whose standard images of
heterosexual male desire are icons of contempt: the skulking rapist, the
leering harasser, and the pathetically frustrated loser. And today's poets
have nothing better, or even different, to offer.

-------------------------------------------------
Now I'm wondering if anything I've written above is going to be judged
abuse. Oh well, I've been kicked off better lists than this.

--------------------------------------------------
Quote of the week:

   If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to
change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the
safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left
free to combat it.

                           -- Thomas Jefferson

==================================================

Jon Corelis [log in to unmask]
www.geocities.com/joncpoetics

==================================================



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