At 03:52 PM 8/25/2007, you wrote:
>On 8/25/07, Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > In general agreement here, except:
> >
> > 1. whether a poem is "political" epends on the scope one gives the term
>
>sure , but to mis-quote Eagleton, if everything is political then the
>term becomes meaningless.
>I can make up a situation where this poem maybe a political gesture,
>that's not to say it is. You could make a case for the equivocation
>between religion and humanism. If that's political, then so be it. I
>don't think I'd sign my name to such a thing.


My work on Cuban poetry has sensitized me to this 
question. In Cuba and its diaspora "political" in 
its broadest sense and in particular has been the 
default position since the late 19th century, and 
poets who weren't overtly political would be 
called out for it by critics. This is way before 
Castro., and has to do with the prestige afforded 
to poets in Cuba and Latin America in general and 
their status as public figures. The defense of 
those accused of being apolitical was often "not 
only are we not apolitical, but in our greater 
engagement with the moment we're more political 
than you are." Which may be read as an 
understanding of the social and cultural as political.

In recent years in Cuba, in the period following 
the dominance of social realism in the 90s, most 
poets have steered clear of the overtly political 
in the narrow sense. But it sneaks in in the 
strangest contexts. Fernandez Larrea ends El pais 
de los elfos (The Land of Elves), a poem of childhood reminiscence:

el país estará siempre lejano
como un sueño como un vientre como el país de los elfos
cojones

that land will always be far away
like a dream like a womb like the land of elves
damn

Nothing in the poem prepares one for that cojones 
at the end, and I asked him about it. "I left 
Cuba in June of 1995 with a phoney invitation 
from a Spanish organization, supposedly to direct 
some documentaries," he answered. "I had been 
abroad at various times: in 1985-86 in the 
Angolan War; in 1986 in the former German 
Democratic Republic; in 1990 in Czechoslovakia. 
The following year I was in France, where I 
thought to remain, but decided otherwise. And in 
1993 I lived in Guadalajara, Mexico, for several 
months, but I returned to the island. By ’95 the 
situation (my situation) was insupportable and 
unsustainable. Out of all this weariness comes 
the 'damn' (cojones) of 'The Land of Elves,' 
which is something like 'the promised future, idyllic communism.'"

Here's a question: is Ponge's great poem Le Pré, 
which catalogues a meadow, ecological, although 
it espouses no system of or phylogeny for it, no coherent ecosystematization?

Mark