Hi Dominic - poking my nose in briefly - but just wanted to say, yes! and
thankyou! for this wonderful explication of Oliver's difficult and painful
ethics, which I think too are in their own particular way exemplary. A
certain destitution, as you say.
All best
A
On 29/4/06 9:21 AM, "Dominic Fox" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Reading Douglas Oliver, I'm struck by the personal humility and moral
> goodness (of a hard-won and never self-assured variety) of the voice
> projected by the poems. I would like to be able to learn from those
> poems how to be a better person. It isn't strictly speaking the poems'
> job to teach me, but they arouse the desire to learn and point it in
> certain directions. Oliver's poems are not meant to induce moral
> admiration - they point, on the contrary, to a certain destitution -
> but I nevertheless find something to admire in them, in the trajectory
> taken by them. They are also admirable from a technical perspective,
> although again it is a matter of "art that conceals art": as brilliant
> as "The Infant and the Pearl" is in its formal workings, it is also
> deliberately unshowy, always verging on the prosaic (but verging from
> a slant verge, a decidedly unusual angle).
>
> I'm not aware that Oliver was a drunkard, a prima donna or a
> womaniser. Certainly there is no sense in the poems that it is
> necessary to be any of those things in order to "perform" as a poet.
> There is instead an extensive capacity for *shame* - shame at the
> things that are really shameful, rather than the grand transgressions
> of which one is secretly proud. This is not puritan self-flagellation:
> it comes, in Oliver's case, with a tenderness towards oneself, and
> towards others, as weak and failing selfhoods buoyed up by something
> beyond selfhood that perseveres, selflessly and admirably, amid
> destitution.
>
> I don't think, however, that Oliver's poems are compatible with any
> sort of claim to moral leadership - in particular, to any sort of
> claim that poets qua poets must "lead the way" for others, whether
> through eloquence or through some kind of heightened, avant-garde
> moral sensitivity. Eloquence can justify the "bumpkinry" of a naive
> and morally occluded politics; the "heightened" morality of the
> visionary is often enough an alibi for plain indecency. I don't mean
> that eloquence is always suspect, or moral vision either; especially,
> I don't want to cast aspersions on the eloquence and moral vision of
> Larry Jaffe, about whom I know nothing. (I feel rather bad about
> dragging him into this discussion, without even consulting what he
> himself might have to say on the matter). What I do want to suggest is
> that if one is looking for moral norms for poetry ("poets should..."),
> these are the wrong ones. Poets are not born leaders, but
> "unacknowledged legislators": they have altogether more subtle and
> haphazard ways of being exemplary.
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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