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> I presume David that you're speaking of a minority of these poets' poems > - perhaps Neruda's Odes to Stalin or work of that sort, which certainly > doesn't do it for me as his other work does. Because it seems to me that > their work as a whole, even say Neruda's poems of protest against the > Spanish Civil War which are so full of public rhetoric, most definitely > and blatantly defies those "other censorships", clinging so often to the > interstices of the quotidian; the obscure, the private, the hidden felt > world, and which indeed admits the ambiguity of all speech. > Oh mi gosh, yes, Alison. Neruda's a poet with such a varied and flitting output: I find some of his public poetry crude in the extreme; but also some of it almost a model for public speech, there's that marvellous piece about the United Fruit Company, for instance; and again some of it exactly at the point of intersection of the obscure and the daylit. The Stalin poems are where his machinery goes awry. Except that, Alison, I'm not sure whether in the first place I'm speaking of a minority of either Neruda's or Mayakovsky's output, although I _guess_ I am: I've possibly read something like a fifth of Neruda, in parallel texts, and probably much less of Mayakovsky, which is a reflection of relative availabilty, I suppose. Perhaps this exchange hovers around the fringes of the problems with generality. I guess that two of the poets really to get to grips with on this tack would be the Vallejo of the last book, where the public and private at times almost fuse indistguishably one from each, and yet at other times show the cracks; and the Celan of the middle period onward, who is most definitely 'inwardly of tongue' yet sometimes more eloquent in voice against what blocks people's mouths, and for what is threatened in the 'West', speech's true freedoms of association. Do you think so? I write as someone who can, to a degree, speak freely here, and to a greater extent, say more openly behind 'closed doors', and barely say anything in other spaces of my daily world. best David