Dismissing Keston's prose as difficult or turgid just evades his challenge
and leaves all his points unanswered. It's not easy, he has a very abstruse
vocabulary field especially in dealing with particulars, but surely the
main drift is obvious to anyone. He's saying poetry is too important to be
treated as an idle hobby. The way he chooses to do this , which I happen
to disagree with, is by nominating it a function of the State, and by a
militant insistance on a doctine of zeal within that function, so it all
gets very Red Flag or Catholic-burning. It gets to be the heavy fist on
the door in the middle of the night: Mr Harwood, I believe you have some
books in your possession by non-innovative poets and I must ask you to come
with me for questioning. (In some parts of the world things like that are
actually still very real, in fact there is a war going on precisely about
that sort of thing, as I see it).
But even if we set that aside the broader challenge remains. That, for
instance, banter demeans the calling. Or that the supercilious
ventroliquism of the language of commerce is a sham masking an unspoken
admission of failure which is a serious loss to the [State, culture, body
of poetry, world, or etc. ]. That kind of thing. Are those kinds of
things true?
Whatever we think of Keston's options, and I myself can make no sense of
his disallowance of Lee Harwood or Robert Anderson, do we not agree with
him that the whole thing is a great deal more than questions of taste and
pleasure?
/PR
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