Re Keston, Dougolly, Mozambique, The Question, (Digest???) , Politicos....
Yes, but speaking not as a poet but as a person trying to be as sensible as
possible, I can't help noticing how much more I learn from (a) Keston's
comment on his Mozambique poem (b) Doug's comment on that, than from
Keston's poem. This isn't because Keston's poem is the kind of poem it
is., it would be the same if it were the kind of poem Jon Cornellis writes.
And not just information but brief as those letters are a field is opened
up that can be engaged with because the language's relationship to the
world is a known term. I get the impression a lot of thought and one kind
of feeling has gone into Keston's poem and a lot of another kind of feeling
into Jons'. I'm being simplistic here because i want to be. I feel
Keston's kind of poem wrenches things towards an abstract or essence which
cannot possibly illuminate a subject (like Mozambique) but only the world.
Not dichtung = condensare which is just silly, but a quite religious notion
of attaching a kind of linguistic sky to events. I feel Jon's kind of poem
deals in frustrated rage but omits most of the information and we are left
with not much more than how strongly the author feels about it. The poem
makes a fiction, but why do we want to make a fiction when the facts speak
for themselves?
I think the transmission of Doug's poem on Mozambique is the next necessary
stage in this discussion. The question is of the different operations that
poetry can undertake, and we need to find out what ranges are possible
within authenticity before we opt for any singular notion of what poetical
language is, whether it is entirely its own necessity, or is conditioned by
truth and correctness from outside itself. An old war-horse, but there
still seems to be a lot of hesitation in this zone.
//PR
P.S. Why do we relish guilt?
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