Many thanks to John Tranter and Alison Croggon (in Australia), and
Douglas Clark (in the U.K.) for their advice and opinions.
In my point of view (and this is the reason why I'm working on
the problem of impersonality) you can consider the subject following
two differents perspectives: a) the psychological, and b) the aesthetic.
If you follow a psychological perspective, the questions about
"Who is your writing I?" or "Who are your writing I" is extremely
pertinent, but I suppose the answer is just personal even if
we all sometimes find a stranger in our writings.
On the other side, the aesthetic perspective could be seen,
1) as a reaction against the excesses of ego (for instance, in the
Romantic period Robert Browing and Jules Laforgue's poems
compared with the poems of their contemporaries);
2) as a strategy to build a fiction in which the poet himself is
hidden (cfr. Eliot, the first Pound, the Austin Clarke's mythological
poems, Brendan Kennelly's "Cromwell", etc);
3) as a way to submit subjectivity to its last consecuences (Williams,
Ponge, etc);
4) as a goal in itself (and I think in George Oppen and his huge
influence among the French poets of today and other forms of
the so called "objectivism".
Of course you can ad many things to this short list. I will do so
inmediately:
Argentine poet Juan Gelman, for instance, "translated" imaginary
North American, British and Japanese poets to Spanish as a way
of alienation from his own circunstance. He also mated methaphysical
Spanish poets from XVII century (San Juan de la Cruz, Santa Teresa de
Avila) with very well known tango lyrics as a way to use mystical
ineffableness to talk about the experience of exile.
In every case -and this is the matter to discuss- I think
the goal is to create an illusion of objectivity, something
that could be extrapolated to the experience of many instead of
remaining as the single voice of someone.
Anyway, I would like to hear about other examples and to know
different points of view.
Thanks (and sorry for my english)
Jorge Fondebrider
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|