I must have a different sense of politics. Surely the best reason for not
contributing to the TLS is because it's owned by Rupert Murdoch: that's my
own reason. And while I'm not in the least anti-academic either, to support
a purist poetic career by working for the academy is, as cris implies, not to
escape the impurity of money either. I have been appalled by my own
experiences of the elitist political assumptions that underlie the modern
academies and their administrations.
It is wrongly eclectic to pretend to like things you don't like. Or to
promote them as a value. It isn't wrongly eclectic, for me, to like Bugs
Bunny because I do like him. It isn't wrongly eclectic to recognise that
other people (perhaps of narrower experience) may have a right not to be
aggressed against because they are satisfied with sit-coms or Wendy Copeisms
that drive you nuts. And so on. It isn't wrongly eclectic to agree to be
published with people whose work you don't like because otherwise the public
will never be given a real choice of what poetry to read. The plain fact is,
you never get a chance to do this anyway. But, instead, it is wrongly
eclectic to publish with a seriously contaminated publishing source: that's
the crucial point. But we may need a little tolerance here, because there
are many kinds of contamination and some of them occur as career-hunting in
the most apparently purist avant-garde publications. Self-righteousness,
aaargh! And we are contaminated even in our withdrawals: those old
dialetical problems won't go away. For example, I don't see that a purist
publication discreetly supported by contaminated wages escapes the problem of
impurity: it merely draws an inset circle of purity within the wider
contamination.
However, I'm not in favour of unprincipled publishing of one's work and have
always tried to exercise principled control over my own outlets. Nor am I
unsympathetic about purist publishing. But I am concerned just now about
self-defeating tendencies in avant-garde poetry at a time when -- in my view
-- the need for poetry has never been more evident if we are (at all) to
counteract scientistic determinations of life goals. Purity by refusal to
engage seems to me a moral luxury if that's the only purity available.
There's another kind which is *also* needed: the purity of trying to maintain
principles as honourably as possible in situations of risk, even if some
failure is entailed.
Doug
PS, I hate the terms "innovative" or "experimental" because they have
technical assumptions buried in them: I see no alternative to the old term
avant-garde because it can cover anything that is really desirable without
specifying how it is desirable. Could we have a return to it?
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