Thanks for the Hamill quote, Richard.
I'm not sure about the "speaking for", although it's often done, nor the
transcendent self. If a poem "speaks for", it's about a confluence of
experience rather than intent. I do think the I is an Other, though, and
necessarily estranged and made anonymous by the aesthetic of writing.
I am prompted to paste something from an essay I wrote several years ago:
"Who is the poet?
"Firstly, the poet is a fiction. The poet has nothing to do with the
quotidian self who bears children, buys the milk, scrubs the cupboards,
yells at her partner and forgets to do the tax return.
"That person is irrelevant to literature, although it might appear that the
poet writes about nothing else. Allen Ginsberg's łKaddish˛ is not a great
poem because it tells us about his mother, his homosexuality, the Diaspora,
his childhood, madness or loss. If he wished merely to confess these things,
he could more easily have written a diary. But he didn't: he wrote a poem,
and a poem obeys other, less easily defined imperatives.
"The conflation of the quotidian self with the poet is the beginning of the
death of understanding. Poetry is not therapy, nor autobiography, nor
documentation, nor politics, nor a theoretical arena: although of course it
may disguise itself as all these things.
"The poet is the self who writes poetry. The link between the poet and the
quotidian self is the body. The difference is poetry. Although one is not
the other, it is impossible to separate them. Neither of these putative
selves have anything to do, yet, with the idea of a reader.
"The quotidian self is of minor interest and is nobody's business except the
poet's."
I sometimes think half the business of writing is the making up of the
writer.
Best
A
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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