Robert Archambeau interview at The Argotist Online
http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Archambeau%20interview.htm
Excerpts:
“[T]here are certainly instances where poetry can fill an important political need, and where, perhaps, it can have “major” political effects. As for experimental poetry in the contemporary West—I agree with Andrea Brady, when she says, of such poetry, “At my most optimistic, I hope it encourages its readers—who, as readers seeking out this kind of work, aren’t likely to require encouragement—to think critically about politics, or perhaps to be inspired by such thinking to participate in collective efforts to overcome the tyrannies of capitalism.” That is, I think that thinking about this kind of poetry can be an important spur to critical thinking about one’s assumption—although, like Brady, I do feel there’s a component of preaching to the choir involved. Also, I’m not sure this is a kind of politics in which poetry has any special role over, say, sociology or history or ecology. I’ve always been suspicious of claims about the specia ness of poetry: my colleague Josh Corey, whom I admire, claims that “only poetry can undo the Big Lie — I’m not at all sure that’s true, I’m not convinced that film, or music, or street protest, or editorial writing, or talking to one’s friends, isn’t similar in its effect. There’s a kind of narcissism one encounters sometimes in poetry circles, a sense that this thing that we care for must be of central importance not just to us but to others as well. Sometimes we even see the lack of evidence for such importance as a sign of importance—as proof that we’re Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators” after all. My instinct is to distrust such claims, though I’m open to demonstrations to the contrary.”
[…]
“A politics of obscurity? Well: one could argue that there’s a long tradition of this, or several traditions. One kind of obscurity takes the form of what George Steiner calls “tactical difficulty,” a kind of encoding of messages to get past censors of one kind or another. This depends on the right kind of reader or auditor being able to pick up a message that the wrong kind can’t: old style blues lyrics offer a case in point. There’s another kind of politics of obscurity, which we can think of as going back at least as far as the symbolist, decadent, and aesthetic movements. People like Mallarmé or Gustav Moreau, who advocated an art that turned away from the world, and from intelligibility, as a means of rejecting modernity. If the realist novelists sought to combat social injustice polemically (as did, say Zola or Upton Sinclair), this other path offered an implicit critique via the turning of its back on the world. It’s less a transformation of the world than a refusal of it, or a retreat. The analogy that comes to mind from my personal experience is the hippie commune I spent some of my childhood living next door to, in Maine. Many of these guys had been politically engaged, trying to change policy through protest (a Zola-esque politics, in this analogy), but at a certain point they decided to withdraw from that engagement, and turn their backs on the world they despised, living in obscurity (if that’s not too much of a pun). It’s a politics of sorts, I suppose, in its refusals more than anything else, and its general, unarticulated assertion that there’s got to be another way of doing things. But the ways it changes the world—if indeed it does, and I imagine there are ways—are difficult to trace.”
[…]
“As for the question of the academy—it’s certainly become the main place where one finds poets in the United States, and, increasingly, in the U.K. Of course this has an impact. In the case of the New Critics, the first American generation of poets to enter the academy, it did have the effect of playing-up the formalist element of their agenda, for reasons that are quite explicit if you read their correspondence. The university demands specialization, and poetry can defend itself as a specialization—as something distinct from philosophy or history or sociology or journalism—with reference to form. And if one looks at the kind of poetry coming out of academic programs in the United States now, one sees it is overwhelmingly elliptical in form: that is, it insists on its distinctness from the language of quotidian prose, on its formal qualities that make it a kind of special field of endeavor in an environment that is dominated by the logic of specialization. That’s not the only thing that’s going on, but it’s certainly a part of our current cultural logic. All of this may change, with the big changes that seem likely to come to academe over the next generation, but I’m not in any position to make predictions about what lies ahead, except that it will be different from the way we do things now.”
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