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Pinter's never offered an aesthetic defense of his poetry, and I can scarcely speak for him, but I'm not sure that he would be able to deny that these political poems are any more or less "radically useless" in the sense that lyrical poetry is "radically useless" as you define it, Alison. His political speeches and essays may be another matter, but I discern in Pinter's poetry that same linguistic project that appears in his plays, decontextualized from the dramatic form. It may be bad poetry, though I don't find it so. There is an emotional harshness in the plays just as psychically violent and crude as in the poetry, especially when embodied on stage, when the ambivalence of the reader/writer relationship is more physically expressed with those embodied words. I don't see a difference (from a linguistic point of view) between this, in "Mountain Language": "Who's that fucking woman? What's that fucking woman doing here? Who let that fucking woman through that fucking door? ... What is this, a reception for Lady Duck Muck Where's the bloody Babycham? Who's got the bloody Babycham for Lady Duck Muck"? (Scene 3) And this, in "American Football": "It works. We blew the shit out of them. They suffocated in their own shit! Hallelujah. Praise the Lord for all good things." And so on. It may be the formal decontextualization of the second (the same linguistics, on page instead of on stage), that renders it more crude, less nuanced. But I'm fully convinced that this is just as radically useless, in the sublime sense in which we're talking about it, as any other lyric. Alison Croggon wrote: > Hi all > > I read Pinter's speech a couple of weeks ago (a friend of mine was > translating it and I couldn't resist asking for a preview, despite her > swearing on stacks of bibles not to pass it on...) I've read quite a lot of > his political addresses - in fact, published one in Masthead years ago - and > this struck me as particularly good, and hearteningly brave, and nuanced as > well, given Pinter's predilection for harsh statement. I suspect it might be > a playwright thing (Brecht's thing about "crude thinking"); or in any case, > the Pinter kind of playwright thing. George, I can't come at Pinter's > poems: I think his poetic is profound in plays like Ashes to Ashes and > Mountain Language, and disappointingly truncated in those blistering > political verses he serves up. I can't but think them a misuse of poetry, of > what poetry offers as its own specific freedom; poetry's political force may > in part be the tracing of fracture and wounding, in a profound sense, and > the refusal to smooth over or heal these things, but poetry's freedom - > which is part of that - for me lies in its radical uselessness. (More to > come when I work out what I mean...) > > I too disagree with Pinter - or think he is being somewhat disingenuous - > about the distinction of truth between the writer and the citizen, or to be > more accurate, about the ambiguities that reside in art that must be > resisted in political life. There is a teasing something to be inferred > about language itself under all this that Pinter evades: why is one kind of > deception (art) "good" and others "bad"? Maybe it's as simple as Picasso's > "art is the lie that reveals the truth"; that the deceptions of art open out > reality in an infinity of ways, whereas the lies of politicians close it > down, narrow it to a single "truth" hammered into our brains from above. I > sometimes do think that the conflicts that are splitting our world at the > moment are between ideologies of simpleness and complexity, those who claim > the world is one reductive thing and those who claim it to be plural, > multiple, subtle and contradictory. > > Anyway, that's probably enough from me - > > A > > Alison Croggon > > Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com > Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au > Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com > > > -- George Hunka [log in to unmask] http://www.ghunka.com