When, Keston (if I may address you singularly in public -- do you sometimes
worry about all the silent watchers in this theatre? Sometimes I feel I'm
trying to think as ably as I can in reply to some problem while a thousand
eyes out there in the darkness have their opera-glasses trained on me, it's
most inhibiting...) when, you define leisure as a dialectic, as I should
have done myself, we can agree entirely, and take it as a creative field
sharply distinguished from luxury, even a spiritual facet of work.

I still can't see why the term needed to be introduced. Its common meaning
is much too close to luxury for comfort, and all we're talking about really
is people working at something, why introduce this category to set it apart
from any other kind of work? There are plenty of other works in this
society which are unpaid and preferential, such as a lot of care work. I
much prefer to think of poet as craftsman (craftsperson) and then the
activity is in the same class as carving a wooden chair or playing the
gypsy fiddle, and how could that possibly get called "leisure"? Because it
is set apart from market forces? But it isn't, it inhabits its own markets.
Because it involves study and meditation?-- But they all do, of their
kinds--- woodcarving, social work, gardening, Appalachian banjo--- Study
and meditation and slow learning and discipular submission and even nightly
prayer--- why should poetry or art claim that its paths in these same
routes constitute a special and privileged category set apart from other
forms of work?

However when you say the following---

>> There IS a difference between this type of literary work, where one's
writing can be one's principle or even one's sole labour, and the type of
literary work which gets done in the breaks between work of a very
different kind. Why do you think that Faber were so stupidly keen to
advertise how Simon Armitage was a probation officer? So that we know
what we're getting, and furthermore so that we can TRUST what we're
getting: poems written between work shifts (which can be READ between
work shifts, without a trace of resentment). Of course, Simon ditched his
job when he got famous.

I am much more worried. Are you not coming close to saying, that "we"
(however defined, us university types, full-time poets living the artistic
life or whatever) by our freedom from manual toil or routine employment,
by our freedom from the distractions of earning, are particularly enabled
to create poetic and artistic quality of the highest kind? Isn't it
enough of a privilege to be set up there as it is without claiming creative
priorities thereby? Without referring in the least to you, I do actually
think that one of the most sickening spectacles of this society is people
in extremely privileged positions complaining constantly and professionally
about the state of culture and indulging disruptive manipulation of
established working codes in the name of a leftism which in practical terms
is several thousand miles away from the sinecures they inhabit. Eighteenth
Century vicars here we go again. The whole inner torsion of Cambridge
poetry at its worst, speaking to a closed circle centred on the self,
secretising the language, is the result of this monastic disregard. The
analogy with experimental science doesn't hold water for a second.

There's nothing wrong with such positioning, indeed it's necessary, but
people thus stationed have to acknowledge that they are in a position of
exceptional privilege and their public address system thus needs to be
handled with great scrupulosity, as Jeremy Prynne always has done. The
whole real and positive "Cambridge" push of which we were speaking was
created by people obliged to work at poetry in what time they could seize
from diurnal work, mostly teaching and study. That this was university
teaching and study rather than school doesn't seem to me to make any
difference, and indeed several of the best poets in this country at present
are hard-working teachers in primary and secondary schools. The only ones
doing poetry full-time were those on social security benefit and a few
misfits psychologically incapable of holding down jobs. The poetry from
those quarters was not noticably improved by their lesure. I think it's a
total illusion to imagine that a full-time engagement with poetry or
literature or art is any real advantage in the creative process, and these
days I am actually much more interested in the idea of the poet working
between shifts, or in the last two hours of the day, tired from toil, with
the wine and the candle in the fragment of quiet night.... because that
puts the poet in the position of most men and women where we are, that
makes the poet typical. You can't claim that poetry written in time
grabbed from necessities of toil must reinforce structures of exploitation
which dictate the toil, why should it, by what mechanism? The whole of
Chinese poetry seems to have been written from such a position.

So I have to say that Faber were quite right to promote Simon Armitage as
poet writing in intervals of social work, which at least offered the chance
of someone writing from the life stage that most of us inhabit. That he
actually didn't, grasp that position creatively, but was more like a
tenth-rate northern comedian, (I'm just a common bloke speaking ordinary
words with a perky twist) is beside the point. He has meanwhile, as you
say, moved into a different class of extremely privileged persons:
full-time poets fêted round the world by public and institutional money,
which must be an even more dangerous position than Professor of Diphthongs
at Uxbridge.



I am completely entangled in these threads and the orchestra has gone for a
tea-break.


/PR




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