ANOTHER POLITICS IN A DIFFERENT POETRY

Not in any particular order, some recent impressions and responses...

-First, I might add to recommendations of 'GARE DU NORD' magazine, issue
2/2, 44 pages of A4, recently received from Paris, which has a richly
evocative intermixing of the known and familiarised, the unexpected tinge of
the exotic, the formally challenging, and a few plain spoken verities to
chew on or mull over.

Several 'Gare du Nord' snippets:-

"the plot completely ended brought sounds/ of return to ways down through/
the skylight"
- Rob HOLLOWAY 'Building Site'
"running ever/ never to catch it/ the token--hard to tell from money--/ hard
to tell memory/ stuck unfound."
- Rachel Blau DuPLESSIS 'Recto (Draft 34)'
"get so sick you could travel/ waking alone with enough/ change in your
mouth for a cab/ or at least questioned prayers"
- Jonathan SKINNER from 'Twenty-Nine'
"The most you could hope for is to see your desperately relative self
unlodged from its frame."
- Leslie BUMSTEAD 'Politics'
"risk is about local divergence from the poem's reference tone."
- John WILKINSON 'Regard as Risk'
"You see, when I finally went back to Barcelona, I already knew that I could
not recreate or relive my experiences there."
- James BROOK 'Letter on the Subject of Gaudiville'
and much else besides, including Jeff Conant on 'Death of a Zapatista'
(prose) and pieces from more than a dozen poets, from Joanne Kyger (p.1) to
Kit Robinson (p.21) to Peter Riley (p.38).

A particularly welcome feature of the magazine, though, is its fascinating
samplings of opinion (fifteen writers chipping in with comments about 'risk'
in this issue) and relaxed though freely ranging discussions on such topics
as, here, 'POLITICS AND POETRY'.

'Politics and Poetry': This is, I'm afraid, fairly problematic and
perennially unresolved territory in which the most it seems possible to
accomplish is to stir up the issues and come away with a somewhat different
set of problems than the presenting lot. I'd include as part of this ambit,
however,-

1. STANDARDS OF POETIC FORM
relating to metrics and to content matter
ie,- re Content, what subject matter and uses of imagery recommends itself
to poetry; what is or should be out of bounds?
- re Form, between the opposite poles of strictly defined form (sonnet,
blank verse, quatrain) and unedited automatic writing (literally whatever
comes out of the poet's pen, with no revision or emendation whatsoever) what
claims can legitimately be made on expectations of prosodic coherence,
complexity, sensibility?

Personally I'd say that I see plenty of material leaning toward either
extreme, ie heavily over-edited and narrowly conceived in terms of topic and
execution; over to under-edited and aimlessly meandering besides revelling
in a pedantically commonplace refusal of originality in favour of a supposed
processual or incidentally observational 'authenticity'.

2. VALUING WHAT THE PERFORMANCE OR PUBLICATION OF POETRY
IS INTENDED TO ACHIEVE
For many, poetry is recreational entertainment. In other circumstances an
intent aura of 'high seriousness' can approximate a quasi-religious or
spiritual air of entering into refined and coveted avenues of conscious
experience. Somewhere in between the clever verbal word play and parlour
game puzzle setter replete with adroitly acrobatic trick manoeuvres and
gasping punch lines. Along with the prosaic strains of adolescent middle
class coming of age, or coming to terms in imparting what transpires in the
here and now of this cul de sac of the language landscape fare paid to
partake of the vitally articulated talk shop, when it's not done to orate or
opinionate out of turn.

Poetry as observational, emotive, carrying a motive propensity of whatever
scale, conveying or seeking to impart understandings, of qualities, of sorts
(characteristics and their narratives).

And might the remit of poetry have undergone significant change since, say,
Matthew Arnold, for whom literature was an essential transmitter of cultural
values, against the dissipatory drift of entropic anarchy; Leavis, who
defensively claimed the high ground for TS Eliot, shoring up ruins, then for
the 'organic' life spark he found exemplified in DH Lawrence; since Donald
Davie, who sought to shift the centre of gravity back again to Thomas Hardy
in rural Wessex of the late 19th Century; and on to Eagleton and Bradbury
more recently, who have written cogently on literary theory and modernism
when it's becoming more apparent that serious readers have been turning to
the novel increasingly for intellectual and ethical sustenance in preference
to poetry. A minor consolation may be, nonetheless, that there are,
arguably, too many novels being published in the marketplace now, and
numerous among these may be vocally and strenuously over-hyped.
The 'postmodern' novel, the metafiction and hypertext fiction also have a
tendency to incorporate numerous 'poetic' inflexions as well as, with
curious results, frequently foregrounding the role of illustration, if not
occasional possibilities in interactive intervention and participation. Is
the novel itself becoming more episodic and fragmented, more imaginative and
poetical?

3. AMONG IMPLICATIONS OF VALUES
To merely scratch the surface masking what may intrinsically be matters of
cultural if not ethical discerning, values no doubt come with predicative
strings attached, assuming the values have a real bearing on what they're
presumed to refer to and whether we need to or can know *all* of the value's
formative derivations (as, conjecturally, was poet 'x' genuinely part of the
trend known as the Movement?, was or is poet 'y' a card-carrying member of
the Communist party?, is poet 'z' an associate of the so-called Glasgow
School?, is poet 'w' still working on collaborative projects with poet 'v'?,
has poet 'u' been dropped by/ signed on for publisher 't'?, etc).

It is inconsistent, to begin with, to claim to vale and like *only* work
cast in standardised and elevated verse metre and then to find oneself
unabashedly enjoying a free verse poem.

It is also an issue of some considerable sensitivity where values transit
from the private into the public sphere, and back, a value laden ground of
negotiation - at the very least public life focuses on the productive
provision of goods and services for the marketplace, whereas private life,
which in these terms is nonproductive, furnishes more or less skilled labour
to grapple with the concerns of the public domain. The area of interface is
not without its complications.

Are or could standards be 'elastic' to some greater or lesser degree, or are
there in certain instances hard and fast absolutes (eg strictly ruling out
plagiarised copies, inauthentic hoaxes, spurious political agitation etc)?

How much elasticity of valuation can be accorded with respect to certain
delicate matters of compositional form in, for instance:

Persona and voice (who is narrating the text, who is being addressed?);
Reference (how about grimy city life, betrayal of aspirations, corruption
etc - all more the stuff of novels rather than poems);
Formal coherence (cerebral high jinks pushed to the point of near
unintelligibility);
Ineptness (mistakes with respect to implicated intent plainly apparent here
and there, yet undeniably has quality episodes, as if a really good first
draft the author put aside and didn't finish);
Derivativeness (the poet seemingly recombining segments of several of the
poems he/she has already read and is well acquainted with; or, in some
cases, of certain of his/her own earlier poems);
Prosaicness and direct address (before a poem formally takes on properties
of an essay, an autobiographical digression, or a novel).

An indicative and necessarily, for its part, slightly satirised listing
only, though resolution of these issues may often be unambiguously apparent
in poetry, for instance, by Wordsworth and Hardy, that I'd venture to find
rather less assured and self-contained, being more open to formal
negotiation in DH Lawrence, in Ezra Pound, in Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery
and, in certain respects, in Philip Larkin.

A relevant question that emerges may then concern whether the poem, the
prose poem, the critical comment/ essay, comes into being primarily as a
showpiece for or as a beneficiary of elective practice disposed "to serve
other people's political ideas", as is intimated at one juncture in the
stimulating 'Gare du Nord' discussion article, which brings in frequently
illuminating comment besides on the artistic politics of Allen Ginsberg, or
Jack Collom, and Euripides.
I hope, given a purely selective adaptation of contents here, to later
return to it.


PS Other current magazines recommended:
'Angel Exhaust' 17 (Spr 99): Irish modernism; 'Sulfur' 44 (Spr 99):
Anglophone poetics (particularly reflecting recent developments in
Australia, Canada, S.Africa).


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