> On the other hand, what's going on is sneaking into another project as a
> kind of supplement, not stated but there.
My "Noble Mice" sequence ended up being overrun by this supplement, for better
or worse: I started out wanted to celebrate the virtues of opacity and
roundaboutness, and ended up with lines like "Onlookers scarred for life by
ribcage shrapnel; / Orthodox thuggery turns Lenin's head / to papier mache",
which was rather directly about Palestinian suicide bombing and the Israeli
"response" in Jenin (turn the first letter - the "head" - of "Lenin" about
and it looks like a "J" - it's characteristic of that sequence that its
political payload is delivered via a series of queasy puns and
crossword-clue-like obfuscations).
I find it odd that when I write poetry it's often in direct and rather vital
sympathy with an emotional and moral position I then find myself having to
question in prose. I think it has to do with where one feels one's
responsibilities to lie. In poetry, I have to do right by the language and
will accept as poetically "correct" a poem that articulates a point of view I
am otherwise unable to endorse (but must nevertheless have been able to grasp
at some level). In prose I am a fourteen-year-old boy trying to argue
cleverly in the school debating society: it is about establishing and
defending a position, although once again one may find that one's convictions
do not coincide comfortably with what one is best able to articulate.
With regard to "the" war (it has been referred to for months as if it were
only one, *the* only one, and this is false to begin with), the most of me
wishes very strongly that it had never started and that it might all come to
almost any sort of end as quickly as possible. My son is nearly three years
old; in less than two months' time there will be another child. I remember my
mother telling me that she saw television footage of civil war and mass
starvation in Biafra when she was still a teenager, and could not reconcile
it with the world she lived in; when she was only a little older, she and her
schoolmates were taken to see film footage of the Shoah. I dislike the use of
the word "innocence" in connection with childhood, because to me it implies
the absence of a brutality and meanness that is not at all absent in the real
world of children, but I do see that there are certain things that my son's
view of the world cannot accommodate, and will one day have to accommodate,
and it is acutely painful to spend time in his world while still being aware
of what is going on outside of it. The fact that there are children in Iraq
and elsewhere for whom "what is going on" is by no means outside of their
world is not lost on me.
Dominic
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