Well said. But I don't think that the likelihood of becoming obsolete or
later seeming quaint should stop people writing topical poetry - although
it sometimes stops publishers taking it on - it just means that, when you
look back through an old anthology or magazine, you get an interesting
series of snapshots of the concerns and conceptions of a time. Without this
poetry would indeed be just a universalising discourse chundering on about
the same old things forever. There's nothing much wrong with 'sharing an
experience' either - it doesn't necessarily imply that you think it's the
only one or is all explanatory. It's not 'impossible' to have a point of
view, surely?
Anyway, what a horrible can of worms - subjectivity, theoretical anti-
humanism. "We mutht thmash the bourgeois thubject, thmash it completly!" As
I heard someone declaiming furiously at the CCCP back in the good old
nineties.
John
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