On Wed, 28 Jul 1999, K.M. Sutherland wrote:

> Now that this discussion has got up and running, real points pointed out
> etc., I should say that I regret snapping at you Ric, as I have indicated
> backchannel. Please do rejoin the conversation, if you'd like to -- ?

Thanks Keston - and as I've said I'm sorry my spoof got under skin so much
as to occasion the snap. This rejoining is liable to be fast and patchy,
since like cris I'm preoccupied and dashing all over the place, but:

I love the range of little loops this "conversation" has on it! I
particularly enjoy the Easter-Wings loop - that poem's always fascinated
me, not least because (I have the Scolar Press reprint of The Temple:
Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations) I can't see it (or The Altar) as a
terribly successful shape-poem. I mean, as it's typeset, it doesn't much
look like wings, does it? It makes that point, almost cavalierly, I nearly
said, but that's not its primary function. I note that some editors of
Herbert have so far agreed with me in this as to want to *draw lines
round* each stanza as if to say, these are meant to be wings, gerrit? A
Persian calligrapher or a computer type designer could do a much better
job, if that was what was wanted! The impact of the poem - for me,
somewhere in the sounded interaction of private and public prayer - comes
long after its most obvious feature. OSISTM.

I enjoyed too, as always, the loop about the importance of sounding as,
amongst other things, ways of making difficult things in a poem clearer to
oneself. Well, you'd expect me to enjoy that, wouldn't you? For me,
though, I wouldn't look on such a process as one which is going to produce
any sense of "definitive" reading of a poem, or as a benchmark test of its
meaning or value. I'd assume that my physical enactment of it would be a
realisation which interacted between me and the (perhaps distant, or dead)
poet. I find that exciting as well as informative. Somebody - a long time
ago now - once wrote to me to say they'd been reading something on mine
out loud, and I found that exciting too, though - or perhaps because - I
knew their voice and speech to be radically different to mine. There's
more than one way to orally interrogate a poem. And each time I read one
of my own poems, it comes out different too.

And I always get a buzz from cris's enthusiasm, his mix-n-don't-match
affirmative creative policy. I've been accused, in the past, of being too
tied to my dog Pluralism, so I always end up sniffing his many trees, and
not choosing any particular tree of my own. It's true - but only partly
so, milud. Look at my work, and you'll find I'm almost obsessively tending
the small gap in the forest I've made for myself over the years, however
much I equally enjoy looking or sniffing at other people's arboriculture.
That's choice, or, if you prefer, literary criticism for you. What I
really fear, at this end of the century - and in this I am a pluralist -
is someone *telling me* what to value and what not to value, to cultivate
and what not to cultivate. That's the language of control, and I reject
it. On the whole, the century's had more than its share of people who
wanted to *insist* their views on others, and most of them have been
blackguards.I'm currently reading Rebecca West's late-1930s book about
Yugoslavia "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" - a doorstop of a book, and
essential reading for anyone before they try to make pronouncements on
that part of the world. What comes across about all the groups, national,
political, cultural, as they seek to ruthlessly impose their truth on the
others around them, is how passionately certain they were of their
complete correctness, their right to so impose. It scares me. Pluralism,
with its implied necessity of not burning one another, has to be better
than that.

In some way, to me, this whole interaction of threads has been about value
- sparked by Keston in Gildas mode (Keston, I'm a big Gildas fan - this is
meant as compliment!) pointing - quite correctly - to the world's infamy;
Mark Robinson accurately portrayed some elements of poets' play in the
face of such as "fiddling while Rome burns". And the question behind it:
what should a poet do? Well, my answer's - you guessed it - plural:

- as a wooly-minded liberal, I support the aid ventures which seem to me
to most probably help the sufferers. I make mistakes, and don't do enough,
and agree that it should be someone else and anyway it's all too little
too late but none of that's a reason for not doing it. I hope when I hit
the rails some idiot will put 10p in my cup too, but I don't think that's
why I do it.

- as a librarian and worker in the social research communities I support
those who are genuinely seeking to expose infamies and - there are
actually some - rectify them to some small extent. I'm aware of the
compromises involved, working within system which is not unconnected
with said infamies. Again, it's not enough, as they say in The Sting.

- as a poet I ... I like to think that to a small extent some of my
language (and that of a number of other poets who I read and admire) can
be a corrective to the abhorrent languages of the perpetrators. Somebody
pointed out at a very basic level for instance that whenever the word
"committee" crops up in my work there's treachery about... Or an antidote,
lessening the poison at however many times removed. Or a reclaiming: way
back in the stone age there was a Pig Press badge which said, against the
infamies of those times: "Retake The Language". And of course, there was
another one which said: wearing badges is not enough. As a - very minor -
example towards what I mean, there's the poem of mine which cropped up on
the list some months back, Flock, which is partly a reclaiming, and partly
- hopefully - an antidote, pinched from Bunyan. It's not enough. But
that's not prescriptive, or even the only way I go about the business of
getting poems which seem to me to have value.

There are, I'd guess, as many ways of going about this as there are poets.
Keston's outlined one which he's going to pursue, and why, and I know
he'll do it well, but Heavens! it'd be a drab old thing if we all had to
do it the same, and I know he doesn't intend that, recognises something of
the diversity, and something of its value. But so many of the strategies
include play: play in the sense of moving into the language of - uh -
"evil" and drawing moustaches on it, or scribbling on it in some way, or
chopping it up to transform it, or taking its meaning out of it. How many
varients, for instance, of Williams' "This is just to say" poem have been
using just this approach? There's an effective one by Mark Robinson in
the Stride anthology for Kosovo - and, as Mark wd say, I'm sure, it's not
enough, but it is there, moving into the language, making it look
ridiculous, making it perhaps a couple of microthingeys less likely that
the politicians can use such falsehoods in anger again. Cris's approach at
times is the kind of dancing-all-over-it play which only very lucky kids
get to do, and that helps too.

Not all play works: sometimes it seems to fiddle while Rome burns (though
completely non-playful poems can do the same: some of the offerings in the
Kosovo anthology seem to do this to me, for all their earnestness);
sometimes it's the arrogant and irritating play of a spoiled brat who's
learned three notes on a piano and plays them over and over until someone
slams the lid; sometimes it comes out pretty boring (as Peter - and I -
find the bits of Bruce Andrews which we've been faced with) but being
boring is completely different to being part of the evil (or so anyone who
sets off to make a small post and makes one as long as this must believe)
and I for one know enough to be ready to accept (a) that the
responsibility in a boring situation is equally divided between the bore
and the bored, and (b) that Bruce's intention is pure in this respect,
certainly there are bigger evils than that to nail, beyond our little
world of poetry. Generally speaking, though, playing with language seems
to me to be helpful, fun, able to alter perceptions, able to make an
impact at some level.

It's also, of course, possible to make poems of value which don't play, or
at least not so self-consciously, and which simply sidestep Keston's moral
question, and go on doing what they'd have done anyway, which "live
somewhere else" as Peter just put it. And yes, these can be and are great
too.

I must've missed some loops out, and anyway I'm coming and going so won't
be following consistently, but anyway, it all seems to be going well, lots
of diversities coming in - next, to clamp down on Long Posters...

RC






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