----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas Barbour" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2008 11:07 AM
Subject: Re: "Remains of the Day"
Well, they shouldn't miss me, & that was my point, Fred. But I don't
think I'm alone in wishing they would/could, etc. I'm trying to
formulate why I feel that such recognition or awareness is important
if one is to write, & whether or not some kind of blindness is
necessary to therefore do so, but I am still in a state of
inchoateness there.
As to your aesthetic, I like the term. A very small group?
Doug
As far as I know I'm it. I see shimmering before me a graduate thesis: "The
Bourgeois Howl: Pollack and the Origins of Beat Classicism." Yale
University Press. No - McGill. Hey, a guy can dream, can't he?
The kind of recognition or awareness I attempted in "Remains" is necessary
if one wants to write the kind of poetry I do, which looks at material
usually left to essayist, historians, and sociologists. Most poets seem
uninterested - as poets, whatever else they write - in poetry as a social
fact, involving institutions and ideologies. They either work within those
ideologies or attack some of them, from within the "institution," while - as
I see it - ignoring others. A socially critical insight has a chance of
being true if it hurts, implicates, the thinker, or at least makes him
writhe a bit. What I see as "mainstream" poets view all such issues as
beside the point of poetry, while "langpos" think their nominalist
assumptions and stylistic practice resolve them automatically. And we all
see each other as blind.
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