Alison thanks for your post --
I avoid 'risk' not entirely, but incidentally and in favour of 'hazard';
partly I suppose this is just a desire to register how frequent the former
term has become in discussions of poetry. Often the risk advertised is
merely that of fiddling with syntax. I put this tersely, but was
impressed by Lee Harwood's comparison with (eg) Mandelstam (we might add
Brecht?).
Really the point is that risk is not only -to be taken-, but is to be
taken at a point and within circumstances of some manifest danger, and in
service of some idea or prospect that this danger seems to inhibit.
It is difficult to imagine how a current American poetry could be risky,
when the great latitude of permission is so orthodox. And yet how
couldn't anyone see how far they all are on the way to bigger danger. I
feel this acutely, having had last night to listen to Michael Portillo
giving a speech on NATO to a bunch of summer school kids (whom I teach).
The speech was of course stacked with punctilious lies and slander, really
deplorable and straightforward. Dicking about with pronouns and bits of
paper isn't going to persuade this man to pipe down &c.
k
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