Hello friends
Ric you seem agitated. That I have not responded yet -- sorry, been too
busy to check e-mail, have only just now seen the string of reply and
inquiry &c.
It's difficult for me to tell whether my messages are actually
misunderstood (perhaps because insurmountably obscure, perhaps because not
attended to patiently, I claim neither), or whether in fact they just
provide the opportunity for several brands of misprision to be again
advertised.
All in all I think the best thing to do would be for me to reply to the
questions levelled and charges put in a substantial and organzied manner.
I'll try to do this before the weekend.
But I must say:
I was by no means criticizing Roger's remark -specifically-, nor was my
description of it as propaganda intended to spotlight it. Rather I was
suggesting that it was quite typical, and of a trend in critical reaction
which can easily appear too incidental to provoke any reflective agreement
or disagreement. I'll explain this more fully.
By saying that poetry is a function of the state, I mean neither that this
is a predicament which I find salutary, nor that it requires anybody to
relinquish any of their preferences or antipathies. Peter, can you really
exaggerate my argument so flagrantly, I might almost say hysterically?
This too I'll explain.
Stephen -- it is indeed shortbreathed to proclaim an outlook 'ideological'
merely on account of Marx having been mentioned. What I find TOKEN, is
not the mention of a writer who after all had a lot of interesting things
to say, and whose ideas have had a great impact on political and literary
thinking; rather it is TOKEN impulsively to recoil from such mention, as
if any reference to a familiar set of critical arguments must necessarily
evince the referee's proclivity to adopt them wholesale. Your objection
seems interestingly anthropological. But quite overdetermined both in its
concert of deliberative weariness, and in its reliance on a personal
narrative which however fails to induce a parody of anything other than
the comic circumstances which mistakenly it proposes as exemplary of some
kind of mistaken zeal.
I'll talk about this too.
When I asked, what is Lee Harwood's function in the state? I might
similarly have said this of Prynne, Wilkinson, myself, anyone. So don't
worry Peter. I do find your idea of poetry as a safe haven from anything
remotely political (remote being the operative term, for you) quite odd.
Firstly, because (as I've said before) your poetry is better than that,
and doesn't deserve the post hoc tarnishing of such a vehement
and patently programmatic eschewal; secondly, because it is a kind of
inverse antinomianism, that all but guarantees that the nation's political
set-up can run on freely without the threat even of a velleitous dispute
from its classical culture-perpetrators. Us, that is.
Harold's review of Andrea Brady is absolutely fatuous. But not
unexpected, from someone who can admire Palmer so dearly.
I'll pay my debt of clarity soon. But Ric: what's all this "WE DON'T HAVE
TO PUT UP WITH TURGID PROSE"? Funny -- if I substitute POETRY for prose
here, surely you'll be up in arms?
k
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