Peter wrote:
>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.
I'm troubled by the idea of a "singular notion" of poetry: is it
desirable that there be such a thing? Speaking as one who has always
defended my right to my own particular selectivities, nevertheless it
seems difficult to find any singular notion in even the briefest glance
over any poetic tradition. Truth only exists in language: outside
language it does not exist. "Truth" is not the same as "reality": but
as one who has sometimes gone dizzy trying to imagine what reality might
be outside our own sensory perceptions of it, it seems to me that in any
real sense "reality" is a difficult quality to establish. Hence to my
mind the desirablity of any number of attempts to perceive and express
it. Is correctness a quality of language correlating with reality as
closely as possible? How is that established? etc etc.
I've recently been reading the charming Australian classic What Bird is
That? and contemplating the sheer delight of language stretching to
transcend its inadequacies to invoke a reality - in this case, particular
bird calls. The result can only be approximate, no matter how accurate
the writer attempts to be: but there is enormous linguistic delight in
that reaching for accuracy. "The bird's cry recalls the sound of a small
frog in distress".
At a remove, it's the same kind of territory that the "political" poems
here posted are struggling with, in different ways. In each case, Jon's
and Keston's, they are abstracting. Neither is more or less "real", but
approaches certain realities from different obliquenesses. Poetry is
always an abstraction, and the danger of abstraction is that it may
abstract appalling human experience right out of the picture. I have no
solutions: the problem remains (and must, always) open to any number of
approaches. Douglas I think mentioned Blake in connection with this: the
other artist who I've been thinking about recently is Goya. I've always
felt a little uncomfortable with Akhmatova's famous statement '"Can you
write this?" "I can." ' It suggests a certain writerly arrogance,
understandable, but still... Muriel Rukeyser's The Book of the Dead is
for me a beacon of how to write an overtly political poem, where neither
the political desires of the poet nor the apolitical imperatives of
poetry overwhelm or trivialise eachother.
A recent book, Reading the Holocaust, by Olga Clendinning (I think I have
her surname correct - the book is not in front of me) is a sensitive and
thoughtful examination of the difficulties of responding to a crime like
the Holocaust when you are not directly affected by it (the questions of
"authentic" response, I suppose: although you can hark back to King,
"injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere"), and a compelling
argument for the necessity of such examinations, if they are done so with
a proper tact and humility.
I saw a book recently called Kaddish which had no words in it at all,
apart from the names of the parts of the ceremony. It was a beautifully
produced, very thick book, and it contained hundreds and hundreds of
photographs of people who died in the Holocaust: family photographs, a
child in a bath, wedding photographs, portraits, mug shots: and later,
photographs of the camps, but none of those with any people, only
objects. It seemed, to me, a fitting response and expressive of the
largeness of the grief, which of course remains in the tiniest of
details. But it was markedly wordless.
Best
Alison
PO Box 186
Newport VIC 3105
AUSTRALIA
MASTHEAD online: http://www.geocities.com/soho/studios/5662
Home page: http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/bronte/338
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