Hi Keston,

apologies were offered in advance for a prolonged absence from discussion
(welcomed i am sure) so no apologies here for that fact. I don't know if
this will find you 'there' but I'm around for the next couple of weeks and
am happy to push this discussion further. The subject line will have to
change, but i left it for some measure of continuity and orientation.

I agree with what i think you're saying about 'conformity' being a fiction.
I might say a manufacture, which reveals some of the colour of where I buy
my knickers from, but perhaps not quite all. Poets reveal their confomities
through their writing yes. So high is any demand for elements of
non-conformity within poetics and so thorough the gathering and sifting of
the hunter-critics that very little that is made in any way public (ie is
not hidden in perpetuity under the bed and never daylit in any respect)
will last for long before it is absorbed. Resistance to absoption is often
a characteristic thaT MARKS A WORK OUT AS MOST URGENTLY IN NEED OF BECOMING
ABSORBED. (sorry about the cap finger straying then, but having relooked at
the screen it seems almost an appropriate emphasis, so i'll leave that
one). It's a trope of a century.

This is what i take it you might mean by formal defamiliarisation becoming
"a sine qua non of poetic experiment". Formal innovation can be easier to
spot than discursive mode. Having written which, might not discursive mode
and formal innovation be symbiotically challenged? I think what's really at
issue is 'intent'.

I'd say not make it new but make it appropriate, render it pertinent and
contextualise it well.

So I'd contest that appropriateness and pertinence in respect of all
aspects of poetic practice would further exegetical agreement and I agree
that exegetical agreements would further discussions. There can indeed be a
miasma of reader reception fending off. Certainly in my own work I have
intent at every move and gain pleasure as well as humour when those intents
are shared by readers. It's much as with conversation. There's not much fun
to be had out of endless conversational exchanges in denial at anything
ever being communicated. Conversation can indeed pass hilariously through
such stages, in extended employment of deliberate misunderstanding. But
that is a travelling or shifting phase, a bracket or punctuation or letting
off of steam or refreshing of attentions. I want to talk and play and
discuss with people face to face and in groups and I want to write with
such a mixture, face to face and in discursive groups larger than that. I
also want to do so with people who are keenly attenmtive readers of
contemporary writing and people who have read none of that and have other
interests.

One of problems perhaps is that with irony in such full play at the end of
a debilitating century it can be difficult to work out where anybody stands
and what they really mean. It can also be hard for some readers to tell
whether things being said are deliberately transgressive, or deliberately
funny rather than just so bad that they become good, and so on and so on.

I think this phase is passing. In its passing there will be stumbling and
some of that stumbling will loop into sentimentalities and lyrical impulses
that will also pass. It's a form of heading back onto a path and away from
a thicket of brambles. Can we discuss a little what might be meant by
'solidarity'? Do you mean that as in 'identify with'? I'm not going to
advocate the identical, although cloning holds no fear for me (only for
others if i'm a model chosen). It's not a word that does it for me. But
agreement through discussion based on shared engagements. I do worry about
poetry becoming ever so po-faced (all sorts of jokes intended) though in
its search for such commons, although I enjoy understanding on such
commons. Nonsense, as it can be consesually defined, as you know, continues
to hold a place dear to my hearth. It's one of the movers in conversation,
it's a useful tool for shifting and mobilising and loosening routines,
ruts, chores. It's a working strategy. That might well be where we'd
differ. The millions of people oppressed and regimented by property laws,
straight-lacing tracts, imposed boundaries, blind dogma, totalitarian
dystopias they want to enjoy living, they have humours to exercise and they
want to have fun too. A humane poetics, fo this writer, finds ways to
create shifts of discursive mode within its writing at every stage. Not to
have the funny thing and the serious thing, but to see them as part of the
living conversational exchanges we make everyday and that many are
restricted from making.

To redress the balance that might be misread from the above, I do not
advocate nonsense as anything other than a corrective to the manufactured
conformities of sense. And I don't advocate such correctives without also
wanting to serious and to be taken as being serious, with intent in what I
say. But the manufacture and the policing of the conformities of sense can
lead to oppressive and elitist hierarchies of reason. Battle with reason
leads away from the humanities of the living to the rigours of the dead.

love and love
cris




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