there was a neat mail on Buffalo Poetics
(http://listserv.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0608&L=POETICS&P=R37372&I=-3)
whose first line goes:
"The claim that poetry and politics are essentially opposed is a sigh
of resignation that wants to make itself universal. "
leads onto
"For one thing, "vulnerability," leaving oneself open to error and to
multiple possible solutions (and to more interesting problems than the
ones we're handed--and, because of all this, to attack), seems to me
to be an essential ethical concept at this time, when we've suffered
through almost five years of a relentless emphasis on "security."
Support for the all-out "war on terror" has been (especially since
9/11) based largely on an insistence on the right to a total safety;
do I need to point out that this safety is factually impossible? That
nothing whatsoever can ensure an absolute safety on any scale? In the
face of this, the demand for invulnerability amounts to a sociopathic
paranoia. This is as true on the interpersonal scale as it is on the
global. Letting vulnerability be is one way of removing oneself from
power relations whose tendency is to reproduce themselves
(indefinetely deferring their own impossible satisfaction), and whose
consequences are brutal."
The "total safety" (leading to the gagging of free-speech) is the telling point.
Roger
On 9/13/06, Tina Bass <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Alison,
>
> One could extend this into literary critcism too, which can of course be a
> demonstration of power (or power's limitations).
> One might argue that some approaches to criticism assert a position of
> 'power over' and therefore can only limit/direct possibilities.
> Other (more constructive?) criticism affirms the 'power to' explore
> possibilities. The latter, by definition, would make no assumptions of
> good/bad but might still ask difficult questions of the
> writer/poet/novelist/artist.
>
> And as with all dichotomies there are lots of shades in-between.
>
> Tina
>
> > if politics is taken in its widest sense, the study of power. To maintain
> > poetry is "above" politics is in itself political, and in a way that seems
> > to me to deny its own agenda and ideology, which I trace from Matthew
> > Arnold's thoughts on culture and the State in _Culture and Anarchy_.
> >
> > All best
> >
> > Alison
> >
>
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