Hello Polly --
you ask, I don't see how 'poetic truth' derives from market forces in the
way you describe. Can you give me an example or explain it further?
The discussion which Chris entered, on the nature of poetic truth, is of
course a very old one. Various answers have been given at various points
in history. Sidney said (for example) that poets, despite the frequent
imputation, could not really lie, since their work functioned always at
the level of the fabulous. This and most arguments can of course be
reversed ad nauseam. What I found (personally) unacceptable about your
suggestion that poetry derives ultimately from a source of individual
honesty and truth, is that the principal outcome of this familiar claim
seems to have been economic: hardly anyone really believes this, but it's
such a sonorous and comfortable piece of positivism that it's the prime
advert for poetry, hence the crass insistence on the back covers of
well-marketed poetry books that the reader's getting some slice of
'authentic' or 'down to earth' confession for her money. This marketing
tactic very much determines the -types- of poet who get published by the
solvent commercial outfits. Bloodaxe, for example, refused to publish
what later became the Parataxis edition of Originals: Chinese Language
Poetry, presumably since they couldn't see how such a book could conform
with the expectations of a consumer-class reared on the poetry of
unpretentious home-truths and starightforward anti-modernist domestic
pathos. Instead of this important book, they publish things like Simon
Armitage's _Zoom_, which fits so obviously into the celebrated provincial
/ working class / North of England demographic etc. The commercial
success of which bolsters the cycle. It is a plainly economic cycle.
There have been notable exceptions to this kind of editorial prudence, and
Bloodaxe have been less mechanical than other big presses, in this regard.
I congratulate their publication of Doug Oliver's Penniless Politics --
but Doug, perhaps you can tell us -- do you think this would have happened
had it not been for Howard Brenton's article in the national press? Anyway
this is all old ground, endlessly re-trodden.
Remedial arguments in the academy are in fact scarce, since the perception
is most frequently either that it would be a waste of time to bother
rowing with (most) Bloodaxe and Faber poets, or that we ought to be
'open-minded' and not so fiercely dismissive of what despite this friendly
urge everyone thinks is an egregious tinsel of the culture industry. On
this list, the open-minded option is almost always preferred, because
there's a terrible fear of chauvinism.
This is all very boiled down and all the protein drained -- if I mention
Adorno, I'll have lost the argument in advance --
k
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