>And in the poem, no matter the unique path of our experience through the
>maze of everyone's, there are equally few alternatives. There may still be
>an authenticity of felt thought possible, a nothing vortex that is
>something else, winnowed, wrested, or smelted from what-all is insidious
>within our minds.

I am in no position to suggest anything useful, except to raise a squeak
at the thought that there are as few alternatives possible in poetry as
in official politics. In which case you might as well, poetically
speaking, just go to the nearest nail and hang yourself. Resistance at
an individual level is still possible, I mean at the level of the psyche,
and to point out it has little purchase politically and none at any
national level, is to invoke values one supposedly seeks to resist. Why
then read or write poetry at all? Although I suppose I ask that question
every day, and it has no satisfactory answer.

It might be possible to ask the wilfulness of poetry to open doors rather
than shut them, perhaps to find some many-ended singularity (if that
makes any sense). Even Beckett, that arch nothing-vorticist, could open
a door disconcertingly on epiphany. In the counter revolution you speak
of feeling has just about become illegal, although pseudo-feeling has
rushed in to fill the vacuum (I suppose you might say the same of
thought, especially where I'm speaking from). One might therefore search
out embarrassments as possible freedoms: the actualities of death, love,
childbirth, loss: whatever becomes cloaked in euphemism or cliche in
order to conceal its disruptiveness. None of these things is
particularly reassuring and it strikes me that these experiences place
the psyche squarely in the midst of its own contradictions. To my mind,
anyway, the realities of subjective experience are hugely elided in this
world, and denying them denies also the permeability of the self, poetic
or otherwise, its I-ness rather than its me-ness, in that the I opens on
reference (I love you) where the me closes insecurely on a secured self
(you love me). But of course there's nothing new about any of this.

The how is another matter. After years of searching for perfectibility I
feel entirely dissatisfied with that process, although I can't think of a
better one, that is, one which pushes you sufficiently hard past ease.
And I can never get past the desire to make beauty, a weakness perhaps,
although I think I agree with my very small son, who said to me seriously
one day that it was a "moral duty".

Best

Alison








Alison Croggon
Editor
Masthead Literary Arts Magazine
PO Box 186
NEWPORT VIC 3015

Masthead online: http://www.masthead.com.au
Home page: http:www.fortunecity.com/victorian/bronte/338




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