Hi Rebecca, Mark
I took Chris' comments in the context of an absolute and growing
crisis that has been happening in our tertiary sector for the past
decade, where universities have been "reformed" to be "vocational"
and now have CEOs instead of Vice Chancellors. The humanities in
particular has borne the brunt of what are actually huge and
devastating cutbacks, and the impact on what's called our
intellectual life as a nation has been and continues to be incredibly
damaging. So alot of the surrounding material is particular to the
Australian situation. That's why I can believe what might be in
other contexts an unbelievable story.
At 2:34 PM -0600 4/28/03, Rebecca Seiferle wrote:
>Well, this is interesting but isn't that point of surrender where
>poetry begins usually viewed as a sort of transitory moment? to
>surrender as a poet means that the surrendering has the
>justification of being of use, poems are born out of it, something
>useful or beautiful or at any rate something has been begotten and
>what is begotten then casts luster upon its parent (hopefully anyway)
Yes; well, beginning and becoming are such complexities. And I could
rabbit on for ages about things like Mandelstam's comment that
surrender to commitment means freedom, or how that surrender of the
barriers of the conscious self make another kind of resistance
possible. And then, of course, I am by inclination a formalist,
which requires a great investment of the conscious self, so the
relationships are all very intriguing and contradictory. But I don't
have time!
>
>And furthermore this surrender is transistory, whatever subjectivity
>one surrenders is picked up again after the poem is written. I read
>the surrender Chris means here as a more permanent state, a kind of
>space of being that would be "unbounded" "surrendered" as much in
>time as space. As
>as if the poet stepped out of the usual definitions of being, for I
>think this is partly the premise of your asking in your later post,
>if HD is a lesbian poet or if Jack Spicer is gay? and I guess the
>answer would be, in terms of many of the academic terms that Chris
>delineates, yes. Basically that too narrow a speciality just means
>we have you in too narrow a box for you to ever get out now.
That struck me as very like that awful dilemma that hit women who
want to deal with feminist issues: that as soon as they are raised,
they are considered both marginal and marginalised, no matter how
profoundly they impact on both men and women; but if they are not
raised and named, they are simply ignored. The self ascription that
one is a woman writer can be both necessarily liberating and at the
same grievously imprisoning, in that the ascription becomes a
catgeory, which then can be neatly filed away where no one has to
bother with it, or "noticed" in ways which erase the work altogether
(I still smart about being introduced at a reading years ago as a
"poet of love and motherhood").
I find it amazing that people can still accuse women who raise actual
and real problems that are to do with their gender of not having a
sense of humour or of being neurotic man haters or censorial bitches,
simply by virtue of raising the problem. One is expected to put up
and shut up, no matter how distressing or limiting the problem, and
if one does not, then one is a "feminist" and therefore immediately
dismissed. But it's been ever so: the Suffragettes were parodied as
hard faced man haters, and awful caricatures were drawn of them in
the popular press; and yet when you look at the real pictures, so
many of them were beautiful and fascinating women! These kinds of
circles can drive a person mad.
Chris seemed to be delineating a similar problem for gay writers.
It's a problem I haven't solved.
Best
A
--
Alison Croggon
Editor
Masthead Online
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
|