----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dominic Fox" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, May 08, 2008 9:40 AM
Subject: Re: today's low


> David Bircumshaw wrote:
>> I like your casual reference to 'that line of Badiou's', Dom.
>>
>> Well, from what little I know of Badiou I believe he uses the poetry
>> of Mallarme and Pessoa as his reference. Now I can understand the line
>> in relation to Mallarme, and too in respect of some sides of Pessoa,
>> though not to all his disintegrating personae, but otherwise it
>> excludes too much.
>> Most poetry ever written in fact.
>>
> Truths are rare...
>
> But "subtracts itself from" does not mean "excludes" (your poem FAILS! 
> immediately as soon as it opens its front door to the outside world). I 
> think it would be a mistake either to take Mallarme as an exemplar of 
> language at some extreme of rarefication or to turn that example - which 
> doesn't really, in the end, account even for Mallarme - into a standard 
> for poetry in general.
>
> Fred's discontents with this notion of poetastry as rarefaction are 
> well-documented, which was why I wanted to suggest that the oneiric, 
> world-wrenching aspect of his own poetry also satisfies (possibly without 
> really wanting to) Badiou's description. A cute, pseudo-mathematical way 
> of putting it would be to say that poetry "diagonalises" the public idiom 
> of "ordinary reportage": it neither confirms nor refutes the doxa (the 
> poet "nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth"), but traverses them 
> slantwise.
>
> Dominic
>

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.  As here:


Rain


A poem turns bad
when it tricks you into
forcing new similes -
complex without context -
on common things.  Rain
for instance.  It can be done:
someone was first
to say that rain is like applause,
silk tearing,
a banner straining,
a vast comforting meaningless whisper.
Invent one and
enthusiasts will say
you've given nature back to them,
their eyes, the things of this world,

etc.  All weekend, rain
moving east.  Saturday,
lightning.  I wait
for a tree to fall (as they usually do
here), hit a wire,
kill our power.  But the thunder stops;
rain remains,
steady and tepid, east-northeast.
For ten minutes every few hours
it falls more noisily, densely.
Backups and accidents;
flood-watch in effect .
When it stops, the heat rises
immediately.  The grass and
hosta are thicker;
azaleas appear, and tulips saved
by deerspray.
For a week they maintain
a brave front, as if satisfied, healthy.
But the rain, as the radio
says, didn't begin to lift
the drought.
We remain in a chronic serious drought.