Stephen wrote:
> I attended countless
>seminars where students who were fresh from school were exposed to
>theory --they drowned in it -- they had no time to read the primary
>texts --they had to spend all their precious time scurrying about looking
>for theory.
This seems a valid point. The primary experience of poetry should
surely be poetry, and a concentration on theory often mediates or at the
worst inhibits that experience.
However, your division between action and language seems a little odd to
me. How is the praxis of poetry not in language? Where else is it? I
am a little suspicious of the demand that poetry should be somehow
beholden to political action, per se. It seems as potentially fallacious
as the idea that poetry is beholden to theoretical this and that. Why?
Poetry isn't obliged to be anything but poetry: the desire for it to be
something else seems to me part of the self inflation I referred to in
another post. Prynne's continual minute shiftings of the crystal may be
informed by political thought (I assume he's part of the crap poetry you
are referring to) but I would have thought the primary purpose of the
poems, if there is one (and again, I wonder that there need to be one) is
to be poems, otherwise he'd be writing something else. Why should they
be anything more than they are? All you have to do is read them.
>Osip Mandelstam wrote poetry that was
>esoterical but there was no mistaking the "risk" he took in writing a few
>lines about Stalin's moustache. If you wish to change things you must take
>that risk. I am willing to do that.
Perhaps if some of these campo types were in another society, Iran
perhaps, they might get the chance to be tortured with cattle prods and
bashed in metal chairs because of their bad treatment of God's language,
and so vindicate their integrity. Perhaps if Mandelstam hadn't been
arrested and died in such appalling circumstances you might attack him
for his obscurities, his use of biology, phsyics and cosmology for
instance might seem as forbidding as Prynne's scientific usages.
Stephen, although I feel some sympathy with some of your points, I don't
think a blow torch erasing complexity in favour of some crap idea of
universal understanding (which presupposes how every reader reads and
responds) will do poetry any favours.
cris wrote:
>Through acts of
>language one proposes positions, possibilities. Hence a syntactical move
>might well speak directly of political transformation or environmentalism
>(the book as an environment with an ecology of materials); a neologism
>might be a naive expression of hope from within a language which has a
>paucity of words in respect of touch or snow, it might not be anything
>other than a utopian longing for expansions of conscious attentions, but
>that might be an improvment on acceptance that a given language is a best
>of all possible languages; paradigms are recognisable as necessary in the
>moment of being interrogated and challenged with the possibility that other
>behaviour is possible, even desirable.
This makes sense to me. Re Lawrence's thought on theory/practice: I
heard a Berliner Ensemble dramaturg say once that theory, if it was any
good, always _followed_ practice. It's more complex than that, of
course, but if theory is at all useful in the making of poetry, it's
usually as a skin which the practice sloughs off. IMHO. My impatience
often comes from the feeling that the poetry itself is lightyears ahead.
Science is too slow.
Best
Alison
Alison Croggon
PO Box 186
Newport VIC 3015
Australia
Masthead Online: http://www.masthead.com.au
Home Page: http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/bronte/338
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