- these reviews are sloppy in most of the available ways, aren't they.  But 
a part of me can still understand why the author of the review of Prynne's 
Poems can open a sentence with "Prynne, a Marxist, ..." - he alludes, 
briefly and misleadingly, to "Questions For The Time Being," a poem which 
seems pretty obviously to cite Marx's criticisms of the leftist agitators 
led by Blanqui. (From The Civil War In France: "Brought up in the school of 
conspiracy, and held together by the strict discipline which went with it, 
[the Blanquists] started out from the viewpoint that a relatively small 
number of resolute, well-organised men would be able, at a given favourable 
moment, not only to seize the helm of state, but also by a display of great, 
ruthless energy, to maintain power until they have succeeded in sweeping the 
mass of the people into revolution and ranging them round the small band of 
leaders." This would be something like "the scout-camp idea of revolution" 
and the "Micawberish fantasy" comprehensively demolished by JHP.)  In the 
same poem there's a "direct question" relating, it appears to me, to the 
political representation-by-proxy of "any discrete class" (the question 
could be MORE direct, I reckon) "with an envisaged part in the social 
process," representation-by-proxy as misrepresentation by a more powerful 
class working in pursuit of its own class interests.

This in no way contradicts Keston's qualification of the clumsy tag 
"Marxist," - just complicates it slightly in acknowledging a certain kind of 
debt to Marx even in the early "un- or even anti-Marxist" Prynne.

Perhaps it's time to institute the previously mooted sub-list for discussion 
of JHP's work, to avoid rattling the cages of the people who get annoyed at 
the mention of his name?  In the context of the british-poets list, I would 
much rather hear talk about a book like Andrea Brady's LIBERTIES.

The reviewer of LIBERTIES at least tentatively managed to identify the 
epigraph from Milton's Areopagitica in the midst of what was no more than a 
list of favourite words and phrases - but I'd like to hear what other 
readers make of the book, because I feel sure that I wouldn't be able to do 
any better.  I hesitate to say why: I don't want my relationship to Andrea 
Brady's book to be completely determined by the gender of the author or even 
by its thematizing (if that's what it is) of the politics of sexual 
difference (if that's what it is), but I don't want to neuter the text in 
the operation of producing a review or an account of it that, well, takes 
Liberties (historically, a male privilege).  How to begin?

all best
robin


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