Emphatically agreed. Only wish that Pinter wanted his poetry to attain
the art of his plays.
Roger
On 12/8/05, George Hunka <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Oh, no, I certainly didn't mean a "minority" on this list, but certainly
> a "minority" in the wider cultural sphere, at least among the press.
> Remember, our ideologically-driven, Rupert-Murdoch-funded "Fox News" has
> a far larger audience here in the States than CNN, and I doubt that
> they'll be saying kind things about Pinter. And when Pinter won the
> Nobel, there was a lot of handwringing that he'd received it for his
> political views (which columnists tended to revile) and not his body of
> work (which columnists tended to praise), as if it could be so easily
> divided up. Yesterday's speech won't change this.
>
> MJ Walker wrote:
> > Breaking an inclination to silence, here - to say that makes a
> > minority of at least two, George. This was kicking against the pricks
> > with an unconquered flame. One can get too prissy about "art".
> > Martin
> >
> > George Hunka wrote:
> >
> >> I'm going to have to take the minority view, apparently, when I
> >> suggest that Pinter's poetry and political essays are just as much a
> >> part of Pinter's body of work as the plays, demonstrably and
> >> identifiably so. A reader needs only look at an early play like "The
> >> Dumb Waiter" (1957) and compare the rhythm, imagery and versification
> >> of its dialogue to poems like "American Football" and "Death"; only
> >> look at the cruelty of Goldberg and McCann in "The Birthday Party"
> >> (1957) and compare it to the cruelty of Bush and Blair as
> >> characterized in the Nobel speech yesterday. The poems stand a closer
> >> look.
> >>
> >> There's a sense in which Pinter's being disingenuous when he makes
> >> the separation between "writer" and "citizen"; I think he may be
> >> doing so as a modest defense of his early, seemingly more personal
> >> and hermetic plays. In any case, it's true that the perspective of
> >> any citizen as he or she, say, reads a newspaper, is a different
> >> perspective than that of a poet when he or she sits down in front of
> >> a blank piece of paper. These perspectives inform each other,
> >> however, as they must, emerging from the same pair of eyes, from the
> >> same mind, from the same heart. Some critic (it may have been Pinter
> >> himself) once described his plays as contemplating "the weasel under
> >> the cocktail cabinet"; these same weasels, Pinter appears to be
> >> saying, have now gained occupancy of the White House and 10 Downing
> >> Street. This realization, perhaps, is what changed his heart and his
> >> pen after 1980, when Reagan and Thatcher came to power.
> >>
> >> A good summation, by the way, in today's UK Guardian from Michael
> >> Billington. Billington closes with:
> >>
> >> "One columnist predicted, before the event, that we were due for a
> >> Pinter rant. But this was not a rant in the sense of a bombastic
> >> declaration. This was a man delivering an attack on American foreign
> >> policy, and Britain's subscription to it, with a controlled anger and
> >> a deadly irony. And, paradoxically, it reminded us why Pinter is such
> >> a formidable dramatist. He used every weapon in his theatrical
> >> technique to reinforce his message. And, by the end, it was as if
> >> Pinter himself had been physically recharged by the moral duty to
> >> express his innermost feelings."
> >>
> >> Whole thing here:
> >> http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,11711,1662115,00.html
> >>
> >> Best wishes, and oddly recharged myself after listening to this speech,
> >> George
> >>
> >> Dominic Fox wrote:
> >>
> >>> I wouldn't agree that the "writer" and "citizen" occupy two separate
> >>> ontological realms. And in any case I think he has them the wrong way
> >>> round. Art makes truths that are *less* complex than reality. What he
> >>> is doing in standing up for what he thinks is right is producing a
> >>> truth. Most people would recognise that his denunciations of Bush and
> >>> Blair are simplifications of reality, rhetorical triangulations. They
> >>> may allow a truth to be grasped, but they are art-works as much as
> >>> they are acts of citizenship. There isn't that much of a difference
> >>> between the acceptance speech and the poems. There is quite a
> >>> difference, and it is a difference in terms of art, between both and
> >>> the plays.
> >>>
> >>> Dominic
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >
>
> --
>
> George Hunka
> [log in to unmask]
> http://www.ghunka.com
>
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http://www.cb1poetry.org.uk/
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