<< 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? >>

Dear Keston,

Don't have much time this morning and I'm mostly giving the list a rest from
me at the moment because I think people might be getting wearied, not just
like Trevor with abstractions, but with my own sainted self for the moment!

There was no suggestion of your above interpretation in my post: you will
find a sufficient acknowledgment in the brackets of my previous message that
I was not much talking about the real lives of the poets concerned. I was
talking specifically about a poetry aesthetic which by closing a community
around itself had little contact with the less knowledgeable. I do not
object to the aesthetic itself and have always expressed very live interest
in what goes on among the poets you mention (I have not even cut my own
poetry off from such approaches which I helped to pioneer -- in my own
usually (but not always) "humanist" way -- many years ago). I don't even
mind a non-humanist poetry, providing it is seen as one arm in a varied set
of poetry armaments. It's just not the only way to go -- it can't be: it's
motivated less by humans in their lives than by theoretical constraints and
so has only a partial role in the overall human activity which is, in my
view, so harmful right now. So I think one should beware of a buried
arrogance which pretends to see where the future will lead. I don't see any
hope unless we work at reforming human attitudes and I don't think that can
be fully done from a position assumed to be outside those attitudes, because
formulated by machine, etc. The only non-humanist poetry I can envisage is a
machine-like assemblage of which there's only one unsigned copy and which is
left to float into history for anyone to pick up later. And whoever set that
floating would have to be sure not to get even a flicker of self-satisfaction
at having performed this action. Otherwise, the WHOLE humanistic field
floods back into the action.

So I remain humanist in the sense that the human mind has so many aspects
that poetry cannot island a part of it -- the sophisticated view that we must
try to escape humanism -- and say this is where poetry will inevitably go.
My insistence on multi-gender, multi-cultural input into aesthetics is part
of this and remains unanswered by an anti-humanist turn which comes mainly
out of male philosophy. The rush towards machines of various kinds, including
mental ones, is, surely, part of the danger of technology, not convincingly a
counter to it. It can certainly be conducted for healthy reasons and to
create a new kind of poetry; and I will back that and have done so. I have
no reflection upon the poets you name. It's so difficult to get this point
over to anyone just because the instant the argument becomes various in the
way I'd like it to be people reform into camps and think that an attack is
being mounted on their position. I despair, sometimes, of ever getting
people to understand my deeper attitude on this.

I have a book on my desk by a Princeton distinguished prof (Charles E. Scott)
arguing out of the Neitzsche-Heidegerrean-Deleuzian-Foucaultian field that it
is harmful to have ethics in politics. Haven't read much of the book yet but
the argument is probably closely connected with a non-humanist approach to
poetry surfaces (I'm not able to state this clearly and don't want to talk an
unnecessarily impenetrable book down); but it's disquieting. Because ethics
in politics have helped to create so many wars, it is not necessarily true
that we should therefore do without them -- instead of creating a more useful
ethical attitude, which would certainly raise all our modern conceptions
about the dissolution of secure ethical stances. When poets have been
arguing about Yugoslavia etc. recently we've had a jugful of clamant ethics,
actually, usually of an unuseful very "humanistic" kind; and I just don't
think any poetry aesthetic has yet substituted a non-identity politics for
that whatever the claims it makes. The difference between making claims for
what one is doing and actually fulfilling those claims is often hard for a
practitioner to see; and in poetry I see a lot of claims made.

I am unapologetic about trying to increase my personal poetry awareness. I
would do so by studying your own poetry too. And your poetry, whatever you
may wish it to be, did not come out of a lack of attention to your own
increase in skills -- don't give me that!

Didn't say the mainstream always make a power grab, Martin. I was thinking
of the sheer viciousness of the ignorant attacks on Conductors of Chaos,
Prynne, a reading I ran in France once, the way prizes are awarded by friends
to friends (oh yes, of course, of course), and the aggressive populism of
arts admin people who need to fill seats in order to justify their attitudes.
I don't necessarily demonise people or publishers, just respond to my
personal experience when they get on my nerves.

Liked the Sidebottam squib, Mr Pain, whoever you are.

Doug


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