> From: [log in to unmask]
> Problems, too, Jon, with the Callimachus poem if and only if it's
> meant as some kind of message. I mean, fine as a squib nicely
> translated -- why not? But let's not imagine that his antiquity
> even his witty influence on later writing give Callimachus any
> special rights on the question of political poetry.
I was trying to restate the Callimachean position -- that the
poet must not stand forth and engage, but rather retire and refine
-- in terms which would resonate in our own times. My own position
on this is more ambivalent than Callimachus's: I think that poetry
ought to be a political force, but this doesn't seem possible
today. Poems are not so much created as they are distilled from
ambient social and cultural conditions, and our current political
discourse consists entirely of words and phrases which we have been
conditioned to respond to by suspending ratiocination. In such a
situation it's not surprising that political poetry finds it
impossible to take any other form than dogmatic polemical preaching
to the choir. Thus virtually all recent political poetry which
I've seen restricts itself to restating a one of a narrow range of
positions which are safe because no one can disagree with them,
namely, 1) the Holocaust was dreadful, 2) sexism hurts women, 3)
what's going on in Bosnia is just awful, and 4) poisoning the
common air and water is a bad thing.
Chomsky in a recent essay argues that the moral and political
obligation of the artist is to tell the truth about injustice to an
audience who can do something about it. I think that another reason it
is currently difficult to write effective political poetry because the
last component is lacking. The only people in our society who can
significantly affect the political process are the ploutocrats who
rule us, and the only time they are exposed to poetry is when they
buy a Hallmark greeting card for Mother's Day.
______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|