Thanks for your post cris, which I found very useful and interesting. I'd
like to come directly to what you say near the end of your post, since
this seems (as you say) to be where we might differ most, and where some
feedback might be most productive. You say,

"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."

I do agree that our writing is productively discursive, and that shifting
the angle of attention and of attitude is a kind of agility without which
none of it tends to get written. I think that would be a basic
description not only of your writing, but of mine too. I'm sure we agree,
here.

Yet I don't see the next step you take. If as you say there are many
people for whom this kind of humour, this style of agile leisure is
impossible (or undesirable) since they must worry about problems of a more
immediate and material nature, why then ought we to advertise so
passionately our own enjoyment of this privilege? So that we can make
even more evident how much more leisure we have in England (and in the
States) than people have in those deprived nations?

This is a real problem for me. More and more I see the verbal tricks of
much new poetry as icons of privilege, the glistering symbols of material
superiority. We might quite reasonably say that the advanced concepts of
linguistic interaction propounded by much new poetry emerging from New
York, London and Cambridge, is a point-blank index of the military and
commercial superiority of the states from which those concepts emerge.
Bruce Andrews would not be at leisure to play with word chains, even
passionately and intelligently, did he not live and work in a city which
(though in many areas impoverished) is the financial and leisure centre of
the world. This isn't a criticism of Bruce; I suppose he would at least
acknowledge the veracity in my indicating this. The point then becomes:
do his word chains evidently take account of this fact, in such a way that
this evidence is empowering?

Leisure is a complex of the humane and the criminal. It is at once the
desired outcome of increased enfranchisement and democratization, from the
Marxist perspective especially; and also it is an index of domination over
a new labouring stratum whose leisure cannot be so advanced. POETRY IS IN
TURN AN INDEX OF THAT INDEX. Poetry is the product of leisure.

This was a larger issue for poets in the 18th century, when the diction of
overt leisure could be critcized in much the same terms which (eg) Bunyan
used to criticize the periphrastic language of impious writers. Currently
we have suppressed the means to criticize this tendency adequately.

Yes I do disagree cris, though I see your point. I think that we
shouldn't have more fun because that fun is impossible for others; also I
think, to come to a another of your points, that the KIND of fun we have
is not necessaarily something we should wish on others, though obviously
they may desire it. In the townships surrounding Cape Town, the skies are
painted by massive billboards advertising Smirnoff. I recall at this
point another disagreement of ours, over billboards: when I see a
billboard in London, I think of -this- billboard, not of the possibilities
for extending the range of discursive interaction through new visual
media. Or rather, the latter occurs to me as an aspect of the former,
constituted cynically through commercial insight.

This has becomne a long one -- any response would be very welcome.

Best to all, k

         



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