Doug, I appreciate a lot of what you say, and can certainly see that in
your case, your salvoing for Africa is a good, worthwhile thing to do. It
seems likely, actually, to enhance your reputation too, though I accept
that this isn't your main concern in doing it. I also appreciate that
using the platform of a well-distributed and reviewed publication is a
useful way to go about such things. Ginsberg, an admirable poet in this
respect, used position and circulation for such purposes, and produced
good work into the bargain. Onwards!
But most of us could be as engaged with such things as much as we liked in
our modest and unnoticed editions of fifty, for as long as we liked, on
this or other world-infamies that concern us, and frankly it wouldn't make
a lot of difference, other than to flag up our concern to a notional
future (though this, surely, is your "where were the poets?" question,
which comes back to reputation-preservation). I've outlined elsewhere a
few of the more modest ways in which our language might make a difference,
so I'm not saying it's not worth doing, and I do think that standing up
and being counted is a valid action. But no-one it was aimed at - that is,
perpetrators of said evil, or even those who could engage said
perpetrators - would hear, let alone listen. Which leads me to suspect
that the validity of the action must be, surely, in other terms.
Perhaps a practical solution might be to engage the attention of a central
publisher in the issues, and then go for an anthology on it. We all know
the weaknesses, in our hands-off arty terms (overstatement alert! this is
a deliberate overstatement!) of such themed do-good anthologies
(overstatement alert! &c...). But this would present *a range of
responses* to an evil in a way that an individual response doesn't, and it
would also be a way of foregrounding the diverse ways in which such things
could be responded to. Cumulatively, it could make a mark.
And I actually think you're being a bit hard, too, in saying we're all so
worried about our reputations: heavens, if I'd been worried about that
I'd've written very differently from years back!
RC
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