>Doug there *seems* to be one constant referent in all of your
>considerations, and this is your own 'repertoire' or personal development
>and attitude. I *think* this is commendable, but not so useful. I do not
>*consider* the field of poetic productivity a resource for autodidacticism,
>and must *admit* that my ignorance of various constituent poetries
>often *causes* me very little anxiety, particularly since I have no qualms
>about *stating* freely and openly that my interest is in transvaluative and
>dialectical criticism, and not in the idea that poetry is the
>efflorescence of humanism. Do you really *imagine* that any 'highly
>educated' poet is so remote from mankind that he or she never comes into
>contact, negotiates with, enjoys the company of and agrees and disagrees
>with people who have a cursory and undeveloped interest in poetry? This
>contact is by far the majority for me, and I imagine for everyone else
>here. I do think you're right to be critical and wary of the university
>as a locus of precepts and celebrity, I feel this way myself. Of course,
>current poetry is very little regarded here, as I suspect in other
>universities. The poets who work for the university here (Drew, Rod,
>Prynne etc.) are all of them extremely ambivalent and cautious of its
>capacity to instigate one poetic propensity or another - wouldn't you
>agree? So I'm not sure what exactly you're objecting to, when you talk
>about universities and some excluded real world. This isn't the
>particular reality for any poet here, all of whom have considered
>everything you said in your post at length, and all of whose poetry bears
>evidence of a strenuous thoughtfulness on that account. I wonder if Carol
>Ann Duffy's poetry bears evidence of reflexive anxiety regarding her
>position as a poetry-industry bestseller. Do you think it does, Doug?
>
>
>I do indeed find your remarks on the usefulness of all different kinds of
>poetry pretty unsatisfactory, as you were quick to anticipate. On the one
>hand you object to contaminated sources (an objection I admire and agree
>with), yet the impulse of your post seems too resolutely petrified in
>point-blank ID politics to extend that rejection also to the PRODUCTS of
>those contaminated sources. You wouldn't publish in the TLS, but you
>might very well read a copy on a coffee table somewhere, catch a glimpse
>of the next advert for common-sense in the poetry slot and pick up
>something new for your repertoire of stylistic affects. Do you not think
>that your more recalcitrant political attitude is the more honest, the
>more serious, and the less contrived? Another way of putting it: do you
>never gain a new cadence through vehement -negative- reaction to the
>poetry of someone else? Through wishing conspicuously to violate a
>cadence, because you consider it harmful or wasteful or manipulative? Is
>'harm' merely the extent of detraction from a state in which legitimacy
>couldn't be in crisis, or could you recognize that much of the world (eg
>transnational corporations) is harmful in precisely those capacities which
>make it -useful-? Albert O. Hirschmann's book _The Passions and the
>Interests_. Isn't it the same in poetry. Sure, Simon Armitage is useful
>for some readers, and I have nothing against those readers as human beings
>(though you seem always to want to make this inference), but I do have
>something against their taste in poetry. It is useful (like capital)
>exactly where it is reductive and a pollution of 'heroic' prospects for
>circumspect and generously confrontational poetry.
>
>Increasingly I sense that this list is in agreement with Doug's humanist
>line. Thanks for your post Doug, which is far more courteous and patient
>than my own, and no doubt more helpful and agreeable to listmembers.
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