Happy not just to imply that I don`t give a fig about "Bill Griffiths,
Eric, &c."
Talking of figs, Doug, not half an hour ago, I stopped by a little Middle
Eastern delicatessen, owned and run by an Iraqi family, in Bank Street,
on my way to this (Glasgow) university. Friends and I have been
buying our olives and our coffee (which they grind for us with some
cardamom) from this place for years and have become quite friendly
with them: one guy always asks when and where we drink our coffee,
shakes his head and tells me I need to drink it in the morning, with
baklava and then, a woman. "Coffee, baklava. And a woman." I say,
"That`s why your shop never opens before a quarter to eleven in the
morning?"
Today he told me he hasn`t slept for two nights, talked about
bombed-out hospitals, &c. (That`s an insolent et cetera but it would
be worse if I just went ahead and told you what he had told me.)
The inadequacy of my response went well beyond my usual
conversational stupefaction and I wasn`t writing a poem, and I still
don`t feel like writing one.
The resolution which allowed the bombardments to take place without
a prior debate and vote in the UN violates the international rule
of law which the bombardments are meant to be asserting. That
resolution is the very telos of the various structural displacements
that have rendered any antagonistic response to the bombings more
than usually useless, mute. The Iraqi family who own the
delicatessen have an M.P., George Galloway, who was on all the major
news programmes last night raging at the Speaker of the House of
Commons who was trying to tell him that, as it was past ten o`clock, he
couldn`t have his anti-war point of order heard.
Poetry`s "preoccupation with its own poetics" does not have to be a
preoccupation. If it is concerned to work out what a decent and
worthwhile response to this situation would be, if such a thing is
possible, it`s only doing what we`re all doing. If Keston`s A
TIP FOR MOZAMBIQUE is of almost no significance, it`s not
because it is' preoccupied' (if you must use the word) with its own
poetics. On the contrary.
all best
robin
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|