So I finally went & read the interview too, Alison, thanks.
Interesting, that he seems to be asking political questions, & raising
his practice as one answer, all the way to:
BA: Which is an encounter with their socialized self. It’s not about
your personal history. And that’s often the identification process.
Author writes about her personal history, reader sees her personal
history reflected in their personal history and is enraptured, and
blah blah blah. So no, it’s about the social context, the social
landscape. When I think of explanation, which I’m heavily invested in
as a concept and a term, I think about context, contextualizing,
rather than narrative. I want people not to find themselves in a
story. I want people to find themselves in a meaningful network of
possibility, of meaning, of value.
and that's really the first place he does that gender thing that
bothered you (& me). But just before that he also suggests that other
forms of something like 'lyric,' but he also includes 'performance
poetry,' cannot do what he seeks to do (although that term
'capacitate' sure doesnt actively excite me).
But aside form your pointing to someone like Carson, I can alo think
of many, & varied, poets, such as Susan Howe, Rae Armantrout, Erin
Mouré, heck, Sheila Murphy, & many ohers, who do not do that trad
lyric (feminine?) thing.
I am reading right now a book by a woman who has 3 kids & is divorced,
& her books fits his critique, lyrics deeply personal about her life
as it played out, & so it does not interest me as much as books by the
people I named above, but just before going through it (these are
books from a publisher with which I am associated, but I did not
choose any of the; here's a fairly large & eclectic editorial board) I
was reading one by a man which had the same problems; so it's not
attached to gender. It may be attached to that lyric desire & how it
is still idealized by many writing programs, etc.
Meanwhile, TL Cowan, in her PhD thesis on performance poetry (which I
may have mentioned before) made a strong theoretical argument for the
political power of some of the feminist/queer performances she
critiqued.
It's both a complex & a conflicted territory (& then it's all just
poetry anyway, which few people read, really....
Doug
On 3-Apr-10, at 5:05 PM, Alison Croggon wrote:
> I got lost where this discussion was happening, so am sending this to
> both lists.
>
> I read the interview, which is actually quite interesting, and it
> prompted some musing. I'm kind of fascinated that one of his models is
> Brecht - whom you would think would be at an opposite axis in
> practice, if not in theory - and another is the ostranie of the
> Russian formalists. And that he places the reader in the centre of his
> practice, with the desire to change the reader's consciousness, to
> make the reader more aware of the social structure which frame him/her
> (something that's been occupying me, although in very different ways),
> and an embrace of an oppositional poetics that means chucking out the
> old to make space for the new, &c (which he also eschews in another
> breath, when he claims that LANGUAGE poetry wasn't oppositional). Yes,
> all stuff that's been heard before, but interesting all the same,
> because of the doubt that seems to be behind some of his answers, and
> which in fact emanates from where he places of the reader. Unless, of
> course, I'm misreading him.
Douglas Barbour
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The secret
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nor reveals itself, it shows forth
tokens.
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