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
|