I tend to agree with what you say about your own work Fred, but not  
always about what you find in others'. Can we not manage (can they not  
manage, say Susan Howe's visions of history in text) also to at least  
hold up to question the given ideology(ies)? I think some do, & I also  
think that some of us (larger group than just here) even in more  
'pure' writing get something said that counts...

As do you...

Doug
On 8-May-08, at 9:16 AM, Frederick Pollack wrote:

> I can't address myself to Badiou; don't know enough about him.  But  
> "the discourse of ordinary reportage" is thoroughly suffused with  
> ideology, both in what it notices and says and what it doesn't.   
> What I complain about in contemporary poetry, whether it "rarefies"  
> or deregulates or thoroughly abstracts from that discourse, is that  
> it doesn't successfully combat that ideological character.  Rather,  
> it invents auxiliary ideologies, attaches them to the main body, and  
> regards this as a critical act.  The assumption behind C. D.  
> Wright's poem is that rummaging through a messy purse of private  
> associations is somehow warmer, more human, truer than "ordinary  
> reportage."  The latter agrees; that is why mainstream poetry is  
> mainstream. The noodling, non sequiturs, inscrutable allusions,  
> crossed-out or superimposed lines, chance juxtapositions etc. of the  
> avant-garde are to me the same product in different packaging, with  
> different additives - more astringent and depersonalized, hence more  
> attractive to academic intellectuals.  The latter believe that  
> narrative is inherently oppressive, that all narrative is  
> Establishment narrative.  I think that narrative is the element that  
> can never be finally coopted and controlled, and that's why I insist  
> on it (or how I rationalize my attraction to it).  And what you call  
> the oneiric and world-wrenching aspect of my work is, to me,  
> suggested by narrative itself.  Once you commit to story, go all the  
> way with it; a great story is never merely escapist, but critical  
> and (in however dark a sense) utopian.  In a sense my work wants to  
> "subtract itself from" prevailing discourse, but only in order to  
> attack it.  And I use the strengths of that discourse, syntactical  
> clarity, spareness etc. (strengths that it, to judge from my  
> students' writing, now feels it can discard), against its  
> ideological assumptions.  I think I do this in non-narrative forms  
> also, and in poems that observe the day and its discourses from  
> within, as well as from dream-worlds.

Douglas Barbour
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http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/

Latest books:
Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
Wednesdays'
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.html

Lives devoted to Beauty seldom end well.

	Sir Kenneth Clark