Listmates : I think it's proper to reply front-channel to masthead, but I
shall speak [as if] to her.

Alison, thank you for your response.

You write
>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.

I guess I hoped I had said your first clause here, through an ellipsis that
encouraged the reader to attach "Resistance" from the previous sentence to
the beginning of the next :"And [resistance] in the poem....may still be an
authenticity of felt thought possible,....winnowed, wrested, or smelted
from what-all is insidious within our minds." I could have been clearer.
Sorry.

As to your suggestion that to name the situation is to worsen it, I'm sorry
but this reminds me of the flowered texts we had on our British walls
throughout WW2 (and they may have hung there since WW1, or the Boer War : I
believe Victoria said them then) : "There is no depression in this house.
We are not interested in the possibility of defeat." Well I'm not all that
interested in perpetuating denial: defeat is always a possibility.

And it strikes me that you are not only in disagreement on this point, but
in agreement also :

>Why then read or write poetry at sall? Although I suppose I ask that question
>every day, and it has no satisfactory answer.

Later, you write :
>Even Beckett, that arch-nothing vorticist, could open a door
>disconcertingly on epiphany.

It's interesting that you name Beckett as a door-opener. I agree. And he
did it through the power of the negative. It excites resistance. Much that
one spends energy trying to save, is gone already. Let's save what hasnt
yet been reft from us.If you will read my letter again, as I have yours, I
believe you will find that we are not only in disagreement.

Possibly about 'psyche' we are. I do not think one's psyche is anything
like an impenetrable fortress. Hence my remark re "insidious within our
minds." 'Psyche' for me has the sense to it of passionate curiousity, the
urge to light a lamp in the darkness, and to be drawn out on a quest---all
as in the legend of the search for Eros, It is an action, or series of
such, & known so. And it is subject to false information as well as true :
being an open-up activity, it is opened to contamination. That's what I
meant by winnowing, etc etc.
. So much that arrives in the mail as present poetry is trying not only to
hang on to Mum and Dad's armchairs and couch but grandma's anti-macassars
into the bargain. . . . And here in incorrigible California, a revival of
interest in poetry at the level of self-congratulation by yuppie upon
yuppie in the name of the Spirit settles upon Poetry like a plague of
locusts. Except they cannot digest it; but they can cover it over with
their scaly bodies of work. Obviously I grow purple at the mere
thought......

(from "Waiting for Godot" : Di-Di: we're inexhaustible. Go-Go : it's so we
won't think.)

Anyway, Alison, I didnt write in to the List except in the hope of lighting
up dark material. Or else indeed as you imply Why bother? Yours is the
hope that goes with youth; mine is the hope that goes with old age. They
overlap, I think. Thanks again for your letter.

David




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