Steven. I'm still waiting for you to explain what you meant by saying (so
often, with such passion and vitriol) that 'Cambridge' poetry is all just
rehashed theory, or is dependent on some body of theory more or less
commonly ingested by people around here. Again: which theory, and in
whose work.
Anyhow. I patently was not 'using' Hegel to wrap up and tag some
definition of what goes on in Olson's work, which (as I have said
repeatedly) I admire and with which I feel quite acutely engaged. But
since you mention it, I was referring to Phenomenology of Spirit section
79: "the exposition of the untrue consciousness in its untruth is not a
merely -negative- procedure." So that this is a reference not to Olson
directly, but to what I have been trying to say about him: that I think
what he said was untruthful or rather rhapsodic and inobjective, but that
this does not mean merely pointing out a deficiency. Maybe then your
point doesn't stand.
By 'rhapsodic', I mean a style of vehement recommendation which relies
rather on the supposed efficacy of admirable rhetoric, than on an argument
which includes any proposition either logically necessary or factually
incontestable. It isn't a slur. It is (eg) the only way in which
Schleiermacher thought that "communication of religion" was possible, and
it is also the way in which Olson talked about "value...perishing from the
earth", and about the role of the Americans in combating this.
As for the question about politics, so far as I understand it: I'm sure
it's evident that I can't stomach the bluff separation of discourses
whether at a 'theoretic' or materially constitutive level, though of
course there are problems more or less proper to each differentiated
category. Poetry is not politics, yes, but part of understanding the
significance of that non-identity is seeing how it does not mean the
-simple absence of relation-, even of fundamental relation. The two are
not the same thing: the two are not unrelated. Charles Olson was a poet,
and also at one point a politician (of sorts). If you want to restrict
the definition of 'politics' to (eg) Weber's in Politik als Beruf, then ok
there's nothing political about, say, syntax. But you don't, I assume.
It's a fabulous jerk of the knee to insist (as Billy does too in a
different though similarly grisly way) that poetry is just poetry and
that's that, no point in clouding our essences when they could be left to
settle into some placid lucidity. Poetry is behaviour towards poetry, at
the instances of creative praxis as also in seemingly unrelated instances
of (eg) retail commerce. It is an aspect of social relations, partly
indexical. To say that politics has nothing to do with poetry is like
saying that the USAF has nothing to do with the sky.
Though perhaps you weren't saying this. In any case, you imply it often
enough.
K
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