Dear Keston
>What better informed
>reaction to the gulf war of 1990-91 than Her Weasels Wild Returning?).
Just meeting this poem, so excuse a few stutters -
but is it primarily an "informed reaction" to the Gulf War? Terrifying,
violent, cold language. Hardly the stuff of Sunday op-ed pages. Is its
informedness what makes you read it? Or its forbidding and hypnotic
formalities? The nightmare they disclose? And I'm still mystified,
troubled even, by who She is...
perhaps some of this will clarify to some extent on further readings.
Who knows? But I do know that if I want to be informed about the Gulf
War, I won't be looking up Prynne's poem, and dare I suggest that I
wouldn't be alone. I would visit for other reasons. I think it goes
beyond critique and informedness and it's precisely this beyondness that
interests me most. A bit hard to articulate.
But - in relation to Doug's posting, and what I know of his poems, I
wonder if he is seeking some more direct focus that this poem, for
example, could never be accused of. If third world debt is wrong, for
instance, it is surely wrong because of the children who die of flesh
eating bateriums or women who die of fistulas after childbirth, for the
want of health care and bad nutrition: or because of families uprooted
and flung into shanties because their traditional farming lands are
drowned in dams or because their forests are woodchipped: or the problems
associated with environmental degradation: or the billion other forms of
individual suffering which can be directly traced to economic decisions
made with no thought or weight given to precisely these horrors. And I
take it that Doug is suggesting that to engage these things opens a poet
to accusations of sentimentality etc. Perhaps in addressing the
economic/political problems, in isolation from their effects, the danger
is that their effects are elided as surely as by the comforting
facelessness of economic equations, that the poet is protected from such
human knowledge as securely as any bureaucrat or banker? I'm not
suggesting merely a micro/macro problem, something else...
A question, only. From my readings of Prynne, he steps lightly through
this minefield with a cold - but not inhumane - and rigorous honesty, but
just so, there are things he doesn't address. Nor should he have to.
But I don't think there is any solution to Doug's anguished question: I
guess one has simply to follow the anguish.
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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