Hi Michael, maybe you noticed the end of my reply to Jamie where I said I never have an issue with what subject a writer chooses to write about, an issue which you are tackling below.

I think this is one of the most awkward subjects around because it touches on so many problems concerned with the relationship between any individual writer and the world they are a part of. In the broadest sense I am always very wary about making judgements or assumptions about an individual's politics or moral position based on what happens in their poetry. I don't mean that I do not at times make such judgements or assumptions myself, because I do, I can't help it, but I am suspicious of myself when I do it. I don't like the way literary critics and cultural commentators always see, or draw, a direct link between an individual person's character or beliefs, or just their life, and their poetry. In doing this I think they misunderstand language.

I have had endless arguments with people who think that a writer has some kind of duty and I suppose my position is similar to that of the surrealists back in the 1930's in their arguments with their fellow communists who wanted them to only write agit-prop. I take the view that it is in what a person does in their life, not what they write, that determines and/or reflects them. One man writes angry and engaged poems but otherwise does nothing that is any different to the man next door while another only writes love poems but actually goes on marches and actively campaigns. (I know its not an either/or, that was just a quick example.) It is not a popular view, I know, and it is definitely something which causes some of the misunderstandings and  disagreements I have had on this list over the years, especially as I am often highly political, as though I am contradicting myself, but I'm not.

Here is an active example...

Ironically I said something in a private conversation recently about how I found so much of the latest American poetry distinctly unpolitical, something about how the poets were turning inward away from having to look at and tackle the big issues which America as a country is having to face - (most of it the result of their own doing but hey, let's not go there). It's a sort of postmod thing I suppose, this turning inward, back into their own lives and relationships for subject, not in a self-examination way but in a far more bourgeois way. I said it as an observation, not necessarily a criticism, and yet it is obviously something which means that I am not going to like that poetry very much and not consider it as worthy as another. But of course that's a comment on the poetry, not on the people who wrote it. Those people are probably a lot more concerned about the big issues than would appear so in their poems. If their poems really are this turning inward then surely it IS because of the big issues - the writing has its reasons, but those reasons are (and this relates to things you were saying in a post the other day to do with influence) not direct ones. Do you see what I mean? (he said in desperation).

Cheers

Tim
        
On 6 Oct 2014, at 11:11, [log in to unmask] wrote:

> Hi Jamie, 
> 
>> "How about the final question I raised? I’m averse to being told what I ought to be writing about – it seems like laureate territory: I’d better address the question of knife crime in schools or of Scottish Independence in my next poem. Pound’s notion of poems being news that stays news doesn’t, I think, mean poems subservient to news items..."
> 
> Of course that's reductively put but there is a big question out there and one that poetry can't escape. Certainly art needn't reflect every brief daily news item.  But to pose it less reductively, shouldn't a comprehensive artistic vision at least have some shared ground with the concerns of other people in that artist's place and time, hence with the way they feel about the  big news stories?  (obviously by shared ground I don't necessarily mean agreement, just engagement.)
> 
> I don't ask the question in order to answer it  
> 
> (Nor with any reference to the Heaney/Muldoon context of what you were saying.)
> 
> but I remember feeling the  question at its most forceful when Martin Seymour-Smith (in the Guide to Modern World Lit) savagely criticized the Afrikaans novelist Etienne Leroux (specifically his trilogy To A Dubious Salvation) for totally ignoring the daily situation of South Africa under apartheid. For Seymour-Smith the dreamy surrealism of Leroux's work was morally revolting, it was culpable in ignoring what the rest of the world (and its news agencies) could see was the main story about South Africa. Indeed maybe Leroux's silence about apartheid was worse even than a lack of interest (could he really be so uninterested?) - maybe it was tactical in its very refusal to engage.  (Leroux was after all the son of a government minister.) . 
> 
> I certainly don't believe that a writer should always be the moral conscience of the nation-state with which they are identified - in fact this tendency to identify writers with their part of the world  (and hence with the hyper-real stereotype of that place, which is the only thing outsiders know about it) - is belittling and ignorant of the varieties of human experience - smug in the certainty of its own judgments -  .  Still I think that Seymour-Smith was quite right to express the disgust he felt while reading Leroux. Surely it was wrong to look the other way, to pretend that artists in South Africa under apartheid could indulge in the same aesthetic parlour-games as Europe or the US? 
> 
> Surely it was wrong to produce literature that pandered to its readers' desire to look the other way? 
> 
> But should art even have a moral conscience? It's hardly possible to conceive, but maybe one day this disgusting aspect will actually make Leroux's writing seem interesting - as interesting perhaps as  struggle novelists like Alex La Guma or Jose Luandino Vieira. 
> 
> Sorry for maundering on, but it's a topic I often think about. 
>