Dear Terri --
thanks for your comments on my small poem. The issue for me has
increasingly been, whether or not such a comment (the ethnography of which
this poem would view as overdetermined), ought to make me feel
disconsolate; gradually I extort from myself greater regard for this
possibility, and in fact this extortion does re-enter or assist in
resubstantiating my writing, subject to any plausible aspersion or
ambiguity that I can make it suffer. To be quite honest, I did feel that
this poem was, at least to begin with, not too oblique. A tip is a small
thing, whether small advice or small change. An inch is not metric, and
pathos is certainly not ethos. I work myself up to no froth whatsoever,
in view of the merry fiction of instant political impact, but (slightly
craven in my nook) I do trust that presently a secured poetic retort can
devolve into an instrumental politic awareness, and that this capacity is
by no means something to be hacked into a pseudo-tactical compromise. The
squib as Robin quite rightly calls it admits to its (and indicts other or
perhaps all recent poems on account of their) confinement within the
reflexive measuring operations of an essentially discrete western pathos;
but it levels this admission not at its readers -- this group of people it
attempts to coerce into the unsolicited position of eavesdroppers,
overhearing (and, by sharing a common language with the TIP but not with
the TIPPED, for whom it is left) enjoying a latent participation in a
brief exercise of pathetic self-castigation. The recent history of
Mozambique is an exceptionally dire one, and the impudence in so
exhibitionistic and opportunistic a gesture on my part is I hope pretty
plain; and yet, it might be a happy thing for us to imagine, flickeringly
and with little real conviction to be sure, that the people of that ruined
country might have the leisure to imagine us as what this poem claims that
we are. Which, for one thing, is this: members of a nation into which a
vast slice of Mozambique's financial aid has disappeared in negligent
investment.
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