Dear Tim,

This is a hard one. I'm not much good about speaking in an informed
way about anything except my own experience, and reading possibly. I
believe in the value of research obviously; I was a journalist for 8
years; yet I am sceptical about objectivity. Are you and Mark and
David better equipped to talk about academic poetry by virtue of being
outside academia? Am I better equipped to talk about pubs by virtue
of having left them in my past? "Better" begins to resemble the
"whiter" of the Daz ads. There may even be a bit of "blue-whiteness"
in the air, do you remember that.

One of the reasons I took the job at Rhode Island School of Design was
that I *wanted* the institution to influence and inform my work.
This is the sort of place I want to work: I suppose it is in some ways
an institutional recreation of the studios and arts centres of my
twenties in Ireland. So far, it seems, the institution has not shown
a great deal of interest in my poetry. We'll see what happens. All
my life I've written what I wanted. What I wanted has been
culturally-bound. Still there can be attention, learning and change.

Factors other than art or poetry absolutely have priority in my life.
But poetry is wonderfully hospitable and has lent herself to whatever
frames and moments I can offer. I can't believe how welcoming poetry
is, how responsive, how willing to be turned inside out, how careless
of ceremony.

As you say we all come to our own understanding of these things,
surviving as we can.

Mairead




On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 09:25:25 -0800 (PST), [log in to unmask]
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Mark and Mairead,
>
> I found your exchange quite fascinating. Of course, what you say, Mark, is
> the kind of evidence that backs up my sense of what is going on, as it does
> the 'impression' that Dave referred to.
>
> Mairead, it isn't really possible to argue with your personal experience
> because it would be taking issue with a life - but that is why this very
> topic is so very difficult to open up - when it is being discussed there is
> a lot more at stake than poetry - lives, careers, whole existential
> relationships to the world. That is one of the reasons why I think it is so
> important to try to understand objectively what is going on. In my
> experience once an arts person becomes involved with an institution
> professionally, to the extent that they are inside it - which is different
> to the kind of external relationship a writer would have with their
> publisher for example - then factors other than the 'art' begin to insist
> their priority. It is a relationship that is entirely one-sided - when a
> wage and the welfare of family etc are at stake there is no contest, but i
> believe that those efected thus are very rarely conscious of it,
> psychological survival would not allow it. So what needs to be talked about,
> regarding the individual, is how to deal with the influence of that
> institutional insistence on the art itself. That alone is a very difficult
> thing to do, but look how much more difficult it is going to be when we try
> to consider the institutional insistence on social groups and how that folds
> back over into poetics and the politics of literature. We have to start and
> end with the poems themselves but the journey in-between is daunting.
>
> Tim A.