Before anyone agrees with me too much, let me say that I take the question of
"contaminated source" as seriously as most poets. I don't believe in an
absolute test of purity. Reminds me too much of Angelo in Measure for
Measure, only instead of there being repressed sexuality there's an
unadmitted taint of how one earns financial freedom to create the purity. For
me publishing is, each time, a question of ethical choice, given my
understanding of the source -- I have certainly made mistakes on one or two
occasions.
If you work for newspapers, as I have, you are subject to a far worse
corruption than any poetry-publishing decision. If you work for any major
university which has an extensive literature faculty but doesn't publish
contemporary writing at all -- again, as I have -- that's just as serious to
me as to publish with a source which is only mildly contaminated (for
example, because it publishes a lot of other poetry whose aesthetics you
don't like). In the latter case you're just publishing a poem or two; in the
first you are committing yourself to social and intellectual elitism so as to
fund your living style. You may seek to counteract this, as I have always
tried to do, by working to support poets from within this system; and that is
a good. But I have found that you can never avoid participating in the right
wing politics of modern university administrations -- not even while you
constantly battle them -- because, simply, they are paying your wage and
therefore nearly always win. If you seek to escape this by living a full
poet-life, taking grants where you can find them, that's not an escape
because of the obvious conundrum of where tax money comes from. If you
discriminate between grant organisations so as to find your purity, I don't
see that makes much difference: it's still a handout from the socially
contaminated sources of money.
Yet I suppose I approve most of the full poet-life because it is the least
hypocritical. Or I believe in relative poverty and lack of career seeking,
even in poetry.
And it's self-righteousness in politics and ethics that I dislike most.
You cannot avoid the difficulty of these decisions each time and you can't
draw up abstract guidelines because we have to accept our implication daily
in social impurity and work with it as best we can, not pretending to do that
better than the average Joe or Sally. One person's damaged purity may not be
the same as that of someone else working to repair damage in some different
way.
Doug
even though, at every point, you try not to join in the harm.
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