Thanks for your answer, David.
>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.
Reading over my email again, I can't see where I said that naming things
worsened them, but I can see where I was unclear: my squawking was to
the idea that the alternatives in poetry are between a corrupt radicalism
and a corrupt conservatism, as in Blair and Hague (or here, Howard and
Beazley), which adds up to no choice at all; and suggesting that poetry
may be more wilful than that. Say, Blake? Doug Oliver invokes him as a
model, as indicating possibilities for response in this world: and Blake
is to me an archpoet, or maybe an ur-poet. Is this a poetry of denial?
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.
Which is perhaps not very different from what you are saying.
>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.
No, we are not in disagreement: that's why I mentioned the permeability
of the self, and was suggesting areas of maximum discomfort (death,
childbirth, love, loss) as a means of winnowing, and also as means of
opening out on the world.
Perhaps some of your response, the flowered texts bit, is to do with my
remark about beauty. I know this is charged, and dangerous in terms of
the temptations you outline, and especially in terms of nostalgia.
Neither can I pretend that I have anything to say in defence of it, nor
can I pretend to have found anything in my own work, apart from the fact
that the desire remains, and thus might be said to be one of the things
that hasn't been reft. And it's always possible to make, in despite, and
that making might possibly not be denial, but the reverse. Young though
I might be - it's kinda nice for you to say so, though I'm not that young
- I know very well defeat is possible and feel it perhaps more closely
than my remarks suggest. I'm wondering what might be salvaged and how,
in a way, it might be possible to continue _without_ hope: to continue
merely with whatever is behind hope, or whatever it is that hope
expresses, in the present.
I hope (!), rather dismally, that this is not too unclear and vague:
email is neither the time nor the place to articulate this, if ever I can
satisfactorily. If it ever works itself out in poetry, I'll let you know.
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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