I enjoyed catching up on this exchange when I got back here. Is it
too late to add a further thought? I'm sure the point can't be that
TR is more radically clubbable than JHP, nor their relative worth, but
more what is required of us as readers. Keston has made some fine
points on the drop-side of "openness", however welcoming its
instances may be. It does mean Prynne can't wholly escape claims of
being esoteric, in that he refuses to supplement the work within his
texts in any way in the form of notes, contextual essays etc (
potentially very rich texts in their own right). Is this a form of
embarrassment, or a lingering fear that his own work would be
compromised by the forms of self-interpretation he must in fact
possess, and which can't be counted as merely reworked within the
poems themselves. His silence may in some sense be reworked there (as
a choice and a renunciation) but that silence could only sound if it
were not in fact inevitable, not theoretically necessary.
I'm not so sure where I am when Keston thinks of reading another
poet as a preparation for writing. The only response to a poem is
another poem, as my old English teacher used to say. Poems certainly
are pretexts for other poems, but there is also something in a more
focused reading of another's poem which is outside that line of
production or contact. Geoffrey Hartman talks about a "work of
reading" which makes a work out of response to the work there is in
the poem, but without perpetuating the art-work as such. Isn't it as
vital to us as poets that we travel that long way round too, so that
poems (even recent ones) come to us as embedded, not as loose weaves
apt for creative recycling? Its the difference between aesthetic
perpetuation and oeuvre, or (to revert to the TR/JHP duality) between
an amenable aporia (open on behalf of nowhere) and a diaporia (the
difficulty of being somewhere when you don't own the grounds for it).
I've borrowed these terms from Gillian Rose and can't pay back the
delete-time I've consumed.
Peter
Peter Larkin
Philosophy & Literature Librarian
University of Warwick Library
Coventry CV4 7AL UK
Tel: 01203 528151 Fax: 01203 524211
Email: [log in to unmask]
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