Except for the fact that it seems to make this poetry list go round,
I'm becoming unsure why the debate re 'materialist and not' still
continues for such a fluid and elusive medium; is it the industry of
definition and labelling? ..there can be no conclusion.....
Maybe I've lost the thread....
Tilla
On 19 Jan 2012, at 12:50, Jay James May wrote:
> Dear Peter,
>
> You may recall my question posted to the list re: better books in the
> mid 1960s (your response to which is printed below).
>
> I wonder if I might press you on the final paragraph: how exactly was
> Lefebvre's 'dialectical materialism' 'attended to' by Andrew Crozier
> and likewise with Prynne and situationism? i'd really appreciate if
> you could colour these observations a little for me.
>
> Warmest wishes,
> Jay James
>
> On 20 October 2011 16:09, Peter Riley <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> The trouble is, I think, that a poetry, Prynne's or anyone's, doesn't
>> actually carry as a purpose a philosophical propositionality of the
>> kind implied by "materialist", so you can't just cherry-pick your
>> favourite poets for whom the linguistic surface acts as a barrier and
>> label them "materialist" because that masks enormous differences of
>> method and belief. Prynne's belief in "resistance" has a
>> "materialist" tenor to it but it was articulated very early and if it
>> informs Brass it does so in a mode pushed to a far extreme: you don't
>> talk about resistance when you are erecting the impossible.
>>
>> And there is a contradiction since any radical departure from what
>> aficionados call (wrongly I think) "singular discourse" sets in
>> motion a whole circus of mental acrobatics on the part of the reader
>> who wishes to cope with it, e.g. leaping across enormous gaps of
>> sense and back-reading for irrational connectives, which amount to
>> acceding to a mystique. Indeed all that poetry bears a quite heavy
>> load of what I can only call mysticism, which makes the use of the
>> term "materialist" in anything like its dictionary meaning quite
>> inappropriate. The polar contrary to "singular discourse" is
>> "speaking in tongues".
>>
>> It would make as much sense to talk of Georgian poetry or Tennyson as
>> more fully immersed in the materiality of earth compared with the
>> cerebral manipulation of citation by recent so-called "materialist"
>> poets.
>>
>> If it helps, "dialectical materialism" (LeFebvre) was attended to in
>> Cambridge at the time (but that was Andrew Crozier, not JHP), and
>> consequently Situationism was taken seriously (that was JHP). I
>> don't think Bob Cobbing was noticed at all.
>>
>> pR
Tilla Brading
Shiplap (Flat 2)
43, Quay St
Minehead,
TA24 5UL
01643 708160
|