No, the mistake you seem to me to be making is assuming that otherness is a
presence.  My poem is directed against that -- just because it is a
comforting thought and allows what I think is a  sentimentality (in the
pejorative sense)  -- a sentimentality and nostalgia that, specifically, is
caught up in the repetition of the same.



The "distancing" in the poem is exactly what needs to be foregrounded to
overcome the false sincerity that presumes to speak of the other:
specifically of the dead -- Vietnamese and American -- and of the living --
the speaker, the veteran (who speaks the way the myth requires except for
the lines at the end (and maybe even then).



First of all, given just how these things are read it's quite a leap to
assume the "embarrassment" of the reader.  But you are right to assume that
they should suffer it.  Most don't.  Instead they are caught up in the
usual.  The reader who moves past that and senses the distancing is pushed
away and then drawn in and if they think that there will be a point where
that won't or shouldn't  happen they are, in my view, being merely
sentimental.



That's the point of the reference to horses /James Wright -- that's just for
them: that is the few who can recognize that allusion and have the best
chance of sensing the irony and distance.  They are not offered anything
that pretends to break through this.  "Plausive" the mot juste --
implicating the writer with its twin suggestions of plausibility and
applause.



There is no opening in the crystal fretting allowing, as you say, someone
Vietnamese to become a speaking subject.  Even the speaker of the poem isn't
a speaking subject if speech means breaking through to a realm beyond what
is forever implicated as an erasure that is always underway.



And it is precisely because the poem pushes against this and then refuses
the solace of "the speaking subject" that it is the truest way I have been
able to write about an absence that should be a presence but can never be
except as an absence.  The dead are never speaking subjects -- the urn that
"speaks" speaks through the usual ventriloquism.  Knowing this might allow a
space for a silence that honors what is lost..


On 11/7/07, Christopher Walker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> <snip>
> You miss the implications of the last lines in "A Short History" which
> say,
> specifically, Goodbye to All That.  That's exactly the move that is made.
> [Joe G]
> <snip>
>
> But it's not a 'move' as such, in the sense of a shift in levels because
> the
> piece is all on one level, albeit the surface is choppy. From 'Here is how
> I
> am telling you I make love to my wife' onwards your frame and distance
> technique is pretty well unmistakeable and it's implicit very much
> earlier:
> narrative modes (eg 'I am meek at work and participate with enthusiasm in
> group activities'), deliberate inconsistencies, framing and distancing
> technologies such as tape recorders and cameras, 'Vietnam movies', the tv,
> the 'coffee table book', other distancing effects ('You see that I am very
> sentimental [...]  Is this too easy?  Yes. [...] You understand.  You are
> also sentimental'). And, of course,  'I threw my father's hammer / through
> the screen.  Incoming.  I kicked my cousin in the face', which precedes
> those final lines. The *embarrassment* which audiences within the text and
> readers of the text should suffer is _assumed_ more or less from the
> outset;
> that's the point. It's one of several possible ways in which *otherness*
> can
> disappear or be suppressed.
>
> Incidentally do you know Hockney's *Picture Emphasising Stillness* in
> which
> two men are separated from a pouncing leopard by the inscription 'They are
> perfectly safe, this is a still'?
>
> <snip>
> Fred: I love your 2-circles exercise; it reminded me of a fascinating book
> called _Laws of Form_ (1969?) by G. Spencer Brown [Candice W]
> <snip>
>
> Interesting that you thought of Spencer Brown. My thoughts ran to Gordon
> Pask, who very much drew on GSP. In particular to the idea that
> understanding happens in the space (including conflictual space) between
> two
> actors.
>
> Fred's 'Then I merge the two circles' sounds like subsumption to me, not
> least since one of them is smaller. But what if *truth* arises through the
> tensions between public and private lives?
>
> <snip>
> Poetry in so far as it has value is exactly a confirmation of what one
> already knows simultaneously with a revelation that one hadn't realized
> one
> knows it.
>
> Actually that's Plato. [Jon C]
> <snip>
>
> Is Plato sound on poetry? '[A]ll [...] poetry is a narration of events.'
> But
> poets are functionaries, subsumed within the public business of the State:
> 'now the founders of a State ought to know the general forms in which
> poets
> should cast their tales, and the limits which must be observed by them,
> but
> to make the tales is not their business.' Moreover Plato's *poetry* can be
> mind-damaging stuff: we must not 'have mothers under the influence of the
> poets' and 'the greater the poetical charm [of unacceptable passages] the
> less are they meet for the ears of boys and men who are meant to be free,
> and who should fear slavery more than death'. So hurrah for socialist
> realism and suchlike!
>
> Actually the 'revelation' referred to above sounds a lot like a revelation
> of alterity. It's also the point in all too many conversations when
> alterity
> is refused and two interlocutors stop arguing about what is *true* and
> start
> arguing about which of them said it first.
>
> <snip>
> poetry is not about creativity or uplifting people but about risk, great
> risk, hurtling oneself at the boundaries of language, ears pressed to the
> borders of the structure and hearing its constraints, which also indicate
> _openings_.  [Doug B]
> <snip>
>
> That sounds rather too heroic and rather too self con(s)t(r)ained. Again I
> think of Hockney's leopard. But what if one forgets about boundaries and
> responds instead to, say, *desire*? (Maybe Anny was heading in this
> direction with her reference to Kristeva.)
>
> CW
> _______________________________________________
>
> 'Listen people, I don't know how you expect to ever stop the
> war if you can't sing any better than that'
> - Country Joe McDonald, Woodstock 1969
>



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