I've been following the discussion with great interest - its rough and
tumble invigorating -
but am perplexed that disagreements are posited when I can't quite see that
great a disagreement -
Broadly, I think there is personal taste (intuition), and communities of
taste (a group who all broadly share enthusiasms for particular poets,
particular forms of poetry), and then a politics of taste, which seeks to
impose one preference on everyone else, this being the point where a canon
is actually fired.
I may have inadequately grasped the discussion, but Geraldine seems to write
in defence of the first, and Rupert writes that we need to respect the
different multitudes of the second, the patchwork allotment, the action of
equality, sharing difference. The view that there is "just writing" would
seem to happily underpin both of these because it's the mass of "just
writing" in which we intuit our way to the work which works for us, and the
liberating notion that there is "just writing" which also allows us to share
difference. Nowhere is there a flat and muddy meritocracy. Taste might
express itself in terms of good or bad, but only the third kind of
power-canon actually wants these to be universal categories and no-one here
has argued for this kind of judgement, as far as I can see, but has – from
different viewpoints – argued against it.
In a desire for equality, or parity, the WMA funders who provoked this
discussion seem to have begun at the insulting point of imposing a
preference when their good intentions were probably – from their mission
statements – actually an attempt to support all the different communities,
which can and should be done in other ways, not handing down dictates to a
single publishing program.
Best, Edmund
|