A bit further joe, as I didn't have time to fully reply last night:
> doesn't apply to me. As D Latane can attest (he was here...one instance
of the souls scattered form rec.arts.books) I have made no power grabs
myself and have shown a fine disdain even for publishing and so on and
getting into all that. Or maybe better...I lack the energy for those venues
exactly...or maybe better I enjoy a deserved obscurity. Whatever. But I do
have fun and this and that happens and I meet blithe spirits and Kent is one
of them and knows that we all go down to the dwimmering dark and on the way
is breaking through certain conventions.<
I have no doubt my strictures do not apply you me ducks, the point I am
trying to make, with the lead-weighted boots of expository e-mail prose on,
is that Kent's concern slip out of focus from the real horrors of this world
onto the somewhat trivial matter of literary status in US poetry. It's not
that I don't realise that there is a kind of power-politics of hierarchy in
the poetry scene, human beings in any kind of commonality of interest will
display status-behaviour, but Kent slides perhaps unwittingly from real
concerns about this world, and I know from some of his posts he does have
them, into the Who's Who of US poetry (in that btw he becomes
unintentionally insular too: I know there are power-games in US poetry, I
also couldn't give a fuck about it, pardon my French, it has minimal
interest to me).
It'd be more interesting if he tried to address the why of why poetry, that
marginalised art, is also valued as a cultural commodity. Y'know, for
example, why on the earth did Tony Blair take a +personal+ interest in the
appointment of Ted Hughes's successor as Poet Laureate, why does Laura Bush
want to court poets too? Etc etc on PEtc.
Best
Dave
Messenger with Voice.
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