Keston I don't know that I am prepared to weigh your position against Peter
Riley's's re Yugoslavia, bombing, and poets.  I know that this might sound
evasive if not ironic, but I simply don't know the context of his remarks,
as they were made at a moment when I was in the delete-before-reading mode.
I do want to thank you for your clarifications, however, and apologize for
whatever characterizations I have produced in trying to make sense of your
earlier posts. I think that, with these clarifications in hand, we have
comparatively little to disagree about.  Part of the problem with this
discussion, as cris suggested yesterday, is the word "eclecticism."  When
you say

What I desire is rather a context for popular publishing
>which is properly indicative of the debate and reactive self-positioning
>which in part constitute the field of poetic output; that is, an anthology
>(for example) which doesn't seek to redress intellectual diremption
>through simple, positivistic equalization of poetic careers, but which
>makes a scruple of identifying its own violence in representing sections
>of work which have been developed in fundamental rejection of just such a
>scheme.

I cannot agree more.  I don't think that any anthology should paper over
real conflict.  Indeed I think that it is the obligation of an anthologist
to acknowledge that conflict, an obligation too rarely met.  I would even
agree with you that an anthology such as the one you mention, in which
every participant would express his/her positions and perhaps even his/her
anxieties about the potential erasure of antagonisms and differences
possibly signified by the mere fact of "appearing together" in such a
context, would be ideal--although also, I fear, impractical if not
impossible.  That is, the situation of poetry in the UK and Ireland as I
understand it, and to a lesser extent in North America also, is such that
few if any seem to me likely to be willing to participate in such a
project, even in the unlikely event that someone could be made to sponsor
it.  I especially find it hard to imagine, say, Mark Strand (or Celebrated
Poet X), being prepared to articulate his differences with or objections
to, say, Hannah Weiner's work, which he has probably never read and would
detest if he did. I have less trouble imagining Barry Watten (or
Alternative Poet Y) going on record about Mark Strand or poets like Mark
Strand, but I can think of cases where that would be a problem too. There
are reasons for this of course, for the fact that there is very little
dialogue at all beyond sneering asides in backrooms.  Please don't think
that I imagine that such a dialogue or such a project would resolve
differences or that I want a Rodney King pluralism in which everybody justs
gets along.  But in order for any dialogue even to begin the different
parties must be brought into some proximity with one another, it seems to
me, and then however that dialogue is managed or left to itself, left to
the poets involved or to an editor's representations or to the readers
themselves, it might at least begin and with some evidence in hand.  That
is my optimism; to repeat, any such project would not be meant to pursue
some forced or artifical resolution.


So I am fully prepared to admit the "myth" named below and must insist that
synthesis is never much of a concern of mine.  I would like to imagine a
pluralism that sustains not only differences but also acknowledges in its
articulation what I called yesterday my order of preferences without
excessive strongarming and with some effort to be, however inadequate it
will seem to everyone involved and to some more than others, fair-- while
also offering reasons for these preferences beside summaries of what I take
to be at least the credible reasons and preferences offered by others. (As
I indicated there will be limits to the poets and reasons I will find
credible as I try to hear as well as I can hear.) That's how I would be
inclined to proceed.  But I will admit that different occasions call for
different tactics, and that sometimes one might want to represent, to
redress, to enable etc. in different degrees.

>
>So: it's not that I feel compassionate simply in wishing to stop readers
>from getting at the resources which I enjoy, or from expanding their
>interest in commodities I do not enjoy.  Rather: I would feel
>compassionate in presenting a book which argued explicitly that
>anthological eclecticism is a myth of corporate endeavour, because such a
>book would be more accurately representative of (eg) the tensions on such
>a list as this one, where we've seen over the years such figures as
>Hughes, Heaney, Armitage etc regularly abused and deprecated.  Why pretend
>that the nation's poetry is just one big synthesis of aesthetic variants?
>What about the real circumstances of disagreement that -- outside of
>anthologies -- precisely constitute the historic obstacle to such a
>synthesis?
>
>To offer an anthology in the hope of arguing ingenuously for a synthesis,
>either current or predicatble, would in my view be dispassionate.  Moving
>from page to page is NOT moving from position to position.  If my position
>on this issue seems fixed, perhaps this is because no poetic labour is
>currently satisfying its criteria.  Or perhaps I should abandon my
>position simply in order to be able to claim that my outlook is evidence
>of a theoretic pluralism.

But then no one would be able to recognize you!

* * *

I have other points I might make about context beyond agreeing with you
that it must be acknowledged and theorized.  But I think that I have
already made them, at least implicitly.  I could quote bell hooks' account
of how her family watched TV; I could insist that no context is isolated or
final or singularly determining.  Blah blah blah:  I'm tired today.  So I
will simply thank you for the note on Heidegger and then paste in this from
your other note:

Keith by the way when I said in my first post that editors still view
their fucntion as that of an historiographer, I didn't mean YOU, but the
editors at the press whose comment you excerpted.  I have no doubt
whatsoever that your own efforts are of genuine and necessary
historiographical importance.  The excerpted comment however I found
quite self-assured yet notably mistaken, insofar as it attempted to divide
'middle ground' and 'avant-garde' poets according to their pursuit of
either English or American interests.

Thank you.  Yes, I agree completely, this "line" has been of regular and
recent interest to me and I find it very depressing as well as very
familiar.  I am absolutely certain that it is not the last time that it
will be typed or uttered.  "Self-assured" indeed, but imagine that this
person had cause to be self-assured given his circumstances: there are such
persons.  One of the possible reasons for an anthology such as you imagine,
or one such as I have sketched, would be to make it as difficult as
possible to utter such nonsense without an answer, in the face of the
evidence.

all best
Keith






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