Yes this generous liberalism is of course virtuous, as Doug and Ric put it.
But can I also suggest that there is an honorable tradition of drawing the
line. People talk as if the various options within poetry were natural and
permanent categories, which of course they aren't. These options are
invented, and drawn out of other people's work, and are pursued for a
variety of motivations including sincerity and ruthless ambition, and their
results on the minds that absorb them might equally vary from pleasure or
realization to stultification or provocation... So if we suddenly find
there is a category of poetry which consists entirely of little pictures of
pigs upside down, with their tails in various convolutions, (and I have
seen things more extreme than that presented as "poetry") do we then start
calling it Pig-Po and saying you can't dismiss a whole way of writing
poetry....?
The central question though is one of result, and you can't approach that
until you've got some kind of proposition about how language (or
substitute for language) acts. Myself I prefer a comparatively practical
one, rather than the various post-religious faiths in magical action
(symbolic transfer of the material signifyer) which float around academic
poetry talk these days.
Isn't extremism too much taken for granted among us, as a legitimate form
of risk-taking, as a right or as an adventure? Has enough consideration
been given to the model it creates? IS it not at least possible, for
instance that the youthkult coffee-bar mentality resulting from the
1939-45 war, the bid for individualistic cultural replacement and
inversion, has had its day and we shall return to a more stable continuum
where, for instance, there is no axiomatic rebellion against parental
presence? If that were to happen the political attitudes within poetry
would probably change radically, because we would start looking in a
different way and elsewhere at the structure, and maybe define harm more
broadly?
The Pig-Po idea strikes me as rather charming, don't you think? No
reference to Pig Press of honorouble memory is intended.
/PR
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