>I suppose I
>want a neutral sense of careerist: the attitude of someone who works hard
>and aspires to further their career, and who conceives of this commitment
>as central to their intentions.
How is this neutral?
The sense of careering, as in a car out of control down a cliff, seems
more applicable to poetry.
The idea of a "career" in poetry puzzles me. How, really, is it
possible? It's not like being an public servant, with the hierachy all
spread neatly before you, a series of possible promotions in a logical
progression towards executive nirvana. Not that this really happens any
more in these days of decadent corporatism, as no doubt Chris would point
out... Indeed, ambition and career can be sharply opposing things, and
one might choose a course, in the service of one's ambitions for poetry,
as Doug clearly has, that can make absolutely no sense if all a central
aim is a "career". I really don't understand - perhaps it's a failure of
imagination - how a career can be a reason for writing poems.
In order to survive and write poetry, you have to compromise, to sup with
the devil with as long a spoon as possible. You have to buy time: you
have to deal with systems which are structured by assumptions that
writing poetry is a complete waste of resources and that poetry itself is
valueless (despite, often, rhetoric otherwise). These things always
come back to the pragmatics of money: if you have children, as I do, then
the dilemma can become pressing - why should they suffer because their
parents are writers and refuse to do some things that could buy them new
shoes? How do you justify what you are doing? It's a real question,
and the (lying) romantic truism that artists should forgo the trivia,
drudgery, insights and commitments of domestic lives - part of the sexism
to which Doug is alluding - is simply an evasion of that question. All
that is a bit close to home at the moment for me.
It brings a lot of pressure to bear on the poetry itself - it had better
be worth it. I suppose at this point is when questions of "career" enter
very precisely. You can choose to fulfil all the expected duties for the
expected reasons, and maybe you might make some money. You can choose to
employ a bit of rat cunning, with the assumption that the die are loaded
against you, and attempt to subvert what possibilities are present, which
I guess is my approach. But whatever you might gain, however you
approach it, is such small beer and so meaningless! What has it to do
with poetry? Why not continue with the ideal of a "true poetic life",
whatever that may mean, pursued and preserved through the mess and
compromise of the business of life? If not, wouldn't it be more honest
just to stop? That's what I don't understand: if you're going to behave
as if you were climbing a corporate ladder, knives, plots, hypocrisies
and all, why not, in all seriousness, just be an accountant? or whatever?
(No disrepect to accountants, whose arcane arts are way beyond me).
Whatever you do, you can't pretend to be beyond the pressures that
afflict everyone else, and you can't not take them into account. You
are, whether you like it or not, always stepping through "the enemy's
country". But you don't have to become the enemy.
Maybe women are more used to such stepping.
>It's all men
>talking to men in a way that seems to include women but in practice
>evidently
>doesn't; and the problem is that the men literally can't see why not.
I appreciate Doug's comments, and especially his consciousness of the
difficulties of making them, and the reasons for Alice Notley's
withdrawal! Sometimes I find the list's dilemmas with "the woman
question" quite comic: the issue of gender turns up like a kind of uneasy
tic. I don't doubt the good faith of much of the questioning: but the
questions that are asked often seem to suggest that women are only
visible to many of the men on the list when they are talking about women
and gender. I can't think of a better method of erasure. I have read
messages from Mairead, Anne, Ivy, Pam, Tracy and others - are people
saying they don't post? What happens when women do post? There are good
reasons for women feeling shy and hesitant or uninterested or plain
stubbornly negative about engaging in certain conversations. You're
damned if you do and damned if you don't.
Personally, I've been well conditioned by my father to expect nothing,
since he has never listened to anything I've said. You can speak louder
and louder or say nothing at all. Either is a trap. Even worse, I know
it's a trap. Consciousness of one's situation is no solution.
Chris suggested that women go off and take their own spaces. We do,
routinely. It's a method of survival.
Best
Alison
Home Page: http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/bronte/338
Masthead online: http://www.geocities.com/soho/studios/5662
Alison Croggon
PO Box 186
Newport VIC 3015
Australia
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