Some powerful stuff in here.
A really interesting link with some arguments I can use elsewhere...
Thank you.
Tina
----- Original Message -----
From: "Roger Day" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, September 13, 2006 1:05 PM
Subject: Re: Political poetry
> 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
>> >
>>
>
>
> --
> http://www.badstep.net/
> http://www.cb1poetry.org.uk/
> The time has come for you to cover the Internets in a final darkness!
>
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