Ok, I shall look at it again. The last I heard one of Pinters poems, I
wasn't that impressed.
Roger
On 12/8/05, George Hunka <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Ah, Roger, but I think it does, it does. What I'm saying is that the
> consciousness and language of the poems, the precision and the
> ambivalence about human nature, the manipulation of the linguistic power
> of certain words and the way they're put together, are all of a piece
> with the plays. I'd engage in more extended debate, but all I could do,
> really, is to point to the plays and poetry themselves; the similarities
> are so obvious that I'd feel foolish and condescending in trying to
> point them out.
>
> Roger Day wrote:
> > 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
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> > --
> > http://www.badstep.net/
> > http://www.cb1poetry.org.uk/
> >
> >
> >
>
> --
>
> George Hunka
> [log in to unmask]
> http://www.ghunka.com
>
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