Doug there seems to be one constant referent in all of your
considerations, and this is your own 'repertoire' or personal development
and attitude.  I think this is commendable, but not so useful.  I do not
consider the field of poetic productivity a resource for autodidacticism,
and must admit that my ignorance of various constituent poetries
often causes me very little anxiety, particularly since I have no qualms
about stating freely and openly that my interest is in transvaluative and
dialectical criticism, and not in the idea that poetry is the
efflorescence of humanism.  Do you really imagine that any 'highly
educated' poet is so remote from mankind that he or she never comes into
contact, negotiates with, enjoys the company of and agrees and disagrees
with people who have a cursory and undeveloped interest in poetry?  This
contact is by far the majority for me, and I imagine for everyone else
here.  I do think you're right to be critical and wary of the university
as a locus of precepts and celebrity, I feel this way myself.  Of course,
current poetry is very little regarded here, as I suspect in other
universities.  The poets who work for the university here (Drew, Rod,
Prynne etc.) are all of them extremely ambivalent and cautious of its
capacity to instigate one poetic propensity or another - wouldn't you
agree?  So I'm not sure what exactly you're objecting to, when you talk
about universities and some excluded real world.  This isn't the
particular reality for any poet here, all of whom have considered
everything you said in your post at length, and all of whose poetry bears
evidence of a strenuous thoughtfulness on that account.  I wonder if Carol
Ann Duffy's poetry bears evidence of reflexive anxiety regarding her
position as a poetry-industry bestseller.  Do you think it does, Doug?                     

I do indeed find your remarks on the usefulness of all different kinds of
poetry pretty unsatisfactory, as you were quick to anticipate.  On the one
hand you object to contaminated sources (an objection I admire and agree
with), yet the impulse of your post seems too resolutely petrified in
point-blank ID politics to extend that rejection also to the PRODUCTS of
those contaminated sources.  You wouldn't publish in the TLS, but you
might very well read a copy on a coffee table somewhere, catch a glimpse
of the next advert for common-sense in the poetry slot and pick up
something new for your repertoire of stylistic affects.  Do you not think
that your more recalcitrant political attitude is the more honest, the
more serious, and the less contrived?  Another way of putting it: do you
never gain a new cadence through vehement -negative- reaction to the
poetry of someone else?  Through wishing conspicuously to violate a
cadence, because you consider it harmful or wasteful or manipulative?  Is
'harm' merely the extent of detraction from a state in which legitimacy
couldn't be in crisis, or could you recognize that much of the world (eg
transnational corporations) is harmful in precisely those capacities which
make it -useful-?  Albert O. Hirschmann's book _The Passions and the
Interests_.  Isn't it the same in poetry.  Sure, Simon Armitage is useful
for some readers, and I have nothing against those readers as human beings
(though you seem always to want to make this inference), but I do have
something against their taste in poetry.  It is useful (like capital)
exactly where it is reductive and a pollution of 'heroic' prospects for
circumspect and generously confrontational poetry.  

Increasingly I sense that this list is in agreement with Doug's humanist
line.  Thanks for your post Doug, which is far more courteous and patient
than my own, and no doubt more helpful and agreeable to listmembers. 

k              




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