----- Original Message -----
From: "Dominic Fox" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, April 28, 2006 7:21 PM
Subject: Re: Larry Jaffe, Poets For Human Rights
Ok...hold on a minute...
*switches off cantankerous asshole mode*
Right. Back in normal asshole mode. Now, where was I?
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.
Dominic
Dominic, this is eloquent and sound. I mean to save it and quote it to
students if and when I again teach an upper-level poetry course.
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