Henry Gould wrote:
>
> Gabriel Gudding wrote:
> >Generally speaking, I think the more one reads, the more education one has,
> >the less likely one is to support something like this, this massively evil
> >and wrongheaded and utterly fucking stupid action.
>
> Yes, it's only us illiterate dough-heads & yokels who support (& fight)
> this war.
>
> GG continued:
> >  There are however a few right-wing pro-war nutcase
> >"poets" on another poetry list I'm on (one of them, I think, just left this
> >list the other day) -- and they will manage to respond kind of lamely and
> >snidely to my posts on that list. But that's how their responses have been
> >to most all issues regarding poetry that's not (1) white, (2) male, and (3)
> >categorizable. But those sorts of people don't really bother anyone, do they.
>
> I can't believe you're writing this seriously, Gabe.   But I'll take the
> bait. This is like a parody of elitist bigotry.  It's also an abuse, as
> most of your rhetoric has been, of the term poet.  You expect all poets to
> conform to your political stereotypes & cast out the rest.  You'd make a
> good official in the Writer's Union once the Ba'ath Party takes
> over.   Mind control.  Control of literature by ideological correctness.
>
> Your idea of "poet" is in the sentimental Allen Ginsberg mold.  It fits
> right in with the current vaporous debate in US blog & list circles over
> the political efficacy of avant-garde poetry in the new (war) era, where
> you have a choice : either to side with the styrofoam-modernist assumptions
> of "language poetry" (ie. writing is a marketable technical process of
> pseudo-innovation), or with the simpler idea that poetry is just a romantic
> form of verbal-political protest.  Basically it's an American assumption :
> writing is simple, we learned it in school.
>
> But modernist poetry was rooted in an earlier history & set of social
> conditions, in which writing itself, & the pedagogy of world literature,
> was rare, cherished & estranged from the everyday struggles of life.  We
> will not be able to grasp the link to previous poetries if we forget that
> the pre-modern & modernist poet was essentially a person responding to
> experience in an aesthetic mode, a mode infinitely estranged & specialized.
>
> The contemporary reaction to such conditions is to argue that they are
> simply undemocratic & obsolete.  But in doing so they lose sight of the
> fact that the visionary technical capabilities of language in its poetic
> phase ONLY manifest themselves in an aesthetic mode, in a state of
> aesthetic responsiveness, which is, indeed, distinguished from ALL
> utilitarian & functional modes of action & rhetoric.  & in losing sight of
> these specialized conditions these so-called poets merely degrade poetic
> speech.  I expect you will try to turn this into a debate over literary
> elitism, but that's not the issue.  Cesar Vallejo was a Peruvian mestizo
> educated in impoverished schools in Peru, who became an ardent Communist in
> Paris : nevertheless he never forgot the lesson of the estranged power of
> pure poetry, or the difference between aesthetics & politics.  He is one
> among many many poets who will not fit into your prescription for "correct"
> ideology.
>
> Does this mean that all poetry is a-political?  Not at all.  Poets can be
> the most powerful political writers, & within their poetry itself.  But
> poetry is only powerful if it remains poetry.  And there is no set of
> approved self-righteous sanctimonious political attitudes or convictions
> which translate, as you would like us to believe, into real vs. fake
> poets.  Only poetic speech in its authentic aesthetic mode brings forward
> the figure of the poet.
>
> I'm a poet.  I support the war in Iraq.
>
> Henry


Before they walk all over you, Henry, I want to express my approval -
with the predictable (and futile) proviso that I fear the domestic
consequences of this war, the power-grab of Christian Right and the
forces behind Cheney; and that I loathe having to agree with W. about
anything.  But politics means making use of the bad to fight the worse.
This recognition will never be comfortable, or even possible, for people
who get continually drunk on moralistic rhetoric and pride themselves on
their virtue, not their effectiveness.

If something needs to added about politics, it's Edmund Burke's law that
a crime, once successful, becomes a tradition.  Even the critics of this
war observe this principle, for in their rhetoric, Saddam Hussein's
constant crimes against his own people are blanked out; they are a hasty
footnote, infinitely less important than the crimes of Bush and Blair.
SH becomes "the Iraqi government" and even, as in an especially subtle
recent posting here, "the Iraqi people."

Your point re modernism is well taken.  Modern poetry is necessarily,
inherently elitist; I don't think the word has much use now - and none
as a term of opprobrium.  Poets who loudly protest their identification
with ordinary people, their desire for a non-elitist aesthetic (Brits do
this one way, Americans another), create, generally, their own
abstraction called "the people," support it with a few personal
anecdotes, and propound it with the same smugness with which "Language"
timeservers cite their authorities.  A successful political poem is one
in which an interesting metaphor can be more or less plausibly confused
with a fact. Brecht and Auden (at one point), Vallejo and MacDiarmid and
Hikmet invented something called "Communism," far more beautiful and
lasting than the movement of that name.  Roy Campbell, at a far lower
imaginative level, invented something called "Christian Spain."  Someone
here recently praised Denise Levertov's anti-Vietnam War poems.  They
were ABOMINABLE, because they invented nothing; they assumed the
reader's agreement; the only energy in them was that of what they
opposed.