On 30/8/05 9:25 PM, "Chris Hamilton-Emery" <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> Quality is much more aligned with celebrity, fashion, branding and our
> identification with brand values whether theyıre political values or
> aesthetic ones (e.g., ³No brand² is now a brand).
Chris - forgive me, but "brand" values seems to lock the whole of poetry
solidly into a consumer model, and I think one of the things that makes
poetry peculiarly attractive to those few who are passionate about it is
precisely a quality of being in excess of consumerist commodification, what
can't be sold or "branded".
This is true, slightly less dramatically, of fiction. I'm told by a market
expert that while non-fiction titles can be sold like hamburgers and
cheesegraters, the market for fiction doesn't, or only in a limited way,
work like that. To the frustration, of course, of publishers, who would
love to back certain winners. The problem is that if fiction books become
popular, it's because people _read_ them; conversely, a much promoted book
can be a dog for the same reason. Fiction can't be marketed as lifestyle
accessories or whatever in the way that most consumer objects are. (Though
the Dan Brown thing probably comes under that heading, as a must have object
because everyone else has it - not in my house, tho... )
That seems to me even more acutely true of poetry. Almost nobody in the
wider world is remotely interested in contemporary poems, yet they keep on
being written, and, against all the odds, even being read and listened to.
Sometimes poetry written with absolutely no consideration for any audience
(Hopkins, perhaps - or Pessoa - what audience were they writing for? What
audience could they have understood in any real way of being real to them?
Is one or two people enough to constitute an audience?) suddenly connects to
a whole diversity of different people. I'm not saying that there are not
mechanisms behind this; but it also seems to me that in some poetry (not all
poetry) there is something that escapes or goes beyond even these things.
More, that poetry I value sets itself in certain ways against these
imperatives, impossible though it might be to escape the cultural machine.
But now we're in Adorno territory again and it's a while I since I read him.
Best
A
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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