Yes, Keston, I caricature your position, of course. I take a veneer off it,
leaving aside a lot that I respect more.

But you pervert mine. I might say something as crude as "poetry is
created in the space which evades politics" but you then read something
like "poetry hides from the big real world of politics in a safe haven of
[what? sensation? art? pastoral? --- none of those will wash]"

This is the old Prynne line from Shelley and Lewis. I don't trust it.
Pure cold hard classical northern politics versus lush southern warm
romantic soft sensation.... False dichotomy. Why interpret thus? Why
introduce safe, haven...? Nothing safe or havenly about it, just a
question of what context your poetry operates in. Politics, as a given,
could be seen as a safe haven against the terror of free-roaming thought.
I refuse the nation or the State as the context of my poetry, or the
English language zone. "We" to my lips is not Us
British/European/Westerners or whatever politically defined mob, and it's
not humankind either. It's the first person plural, proposed out to
wherever it will reach, thinning towards the edges in heavily forested
translation zones.

How, you may well say, then, can History occur if it has no where to occur?
But it does, everywhere, it doesn't require those boundaries, it occurs
wherever there is event of substantial scale. The North/South exponential
tension is a reality beyond the political. Wars occur for totally absurd
reasons, and are opposed out of sheer sentiment. People's houses are burnt,
they are lined up and shot. Politics is both the cause and the answer to
this and of course it would be ridiculous to write poetry as if in a world
where such things do not happen, the liberal/local daze. Every pronoun,
every green shirt, hinges on the total occasion.


I seem to have got myself into a cleft stick.


I'll sell some books for a few days and try again.


But provisionally: I can see a sense in which it might appear that Lee
Harwood's poetry, or some of it, operates as if certain political and
social realities don't exist. But I don't think that's an accurate way to
talk about that poetry since it implies priorities which remain entirely
unproven. Political not equals total. Political not equals topmost. Not
necessarily. Only in certain (highly politicised) conditions or States.


Where is Mr Oliver? he knows a lot about these things



/PR




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