Hi Peter, Sorry for delay in responding, I was away all weekend.
First - agree with what you say about Fascism etc, theoretically anyway.
Well I suppose my side of the argument does depend on what I mean by culture. There is a problem though with trying to answer it by splitting culture up into parts, good bits or bad bits or whatever. Where for example can we split off notions of the family from notions of hierarchy in 1914? I don't think we can. All the 'good' bits seem to imply the 'bad' bits etc. So is 'culture' the wrong word? If it is then I would be grateful if someone could provide a more accurate one.
I've tried to explain what I mean by the differences between blame and responsibility and why I think that might be behind the fact that you have a problem with what you see as 'totality' and I don't. I don't have 'convictions' by the way, any more than I have 'beliefs', I have inklings - my inklings are bigger than some folk's convictions. And I make no apology for using the term 'the rich' because I don't know what other word I could use in current circumstances. Could I say 'culture' though, a cultural phenomenon in which those with the power and money to blame 'everything' on those who do not have the power or money - that's the kind of totalising I abhor, not what some poet writes.
If we sidestep the notion of 'culture' then we are left with a much starker politics because capitalism tends towards being a totalising system so I suppose that, as far as poetry is concerned, it depends on how an individual orientates themselves in relation to that, if it is important to them, or they see an importance there in regard to how they behave as a writer. What they write will then jar with certain other individuals who might orientate themselves in a different direction, particularly if that person does not see capitalism as a totalising system. I think capitalism does TEND towards being a totalising system so I can understand how certain poets work attempts to deal with that - if someone tries to consciously deal with the 'totality' in their poetry then that totality is going to be reflected back. But, I don't think most of us really work like that. Got to think some more on this.
Cheers
Tim
On 19 Mar 2015, at 17:32, Peter Riley wrote:
I once had a discussion like this with a young poet, a rather good one I thought. I was trying to convince him that the word Fascist actually had a meaning -- that it was not the same as saying "Satanic". The point being that Fascism as a system of government and social organisation does not in itself imply the cold-blooded murder of many thousands of people. So those in charge, who chose to interpret fascism as Nazism, made a lot of difference. It was not the work of a "culture", which would implicate the whole of that society and far beyond it, but was a kind of spasm of a particular society responding to both historical and demagogic forces. The "seed" of this, if you like, was already there, and always is, but this does not make the entire "culture" rotten. I didn't get anywhere; Fascism remained simply an evil.
Culture is such an amorphous and disputed concept that I don't see how it can be held "responsible" for anything without a lot of definition. I take it you don't mean "music, painting, poetry, film, theatre..." were responsible for WW1, but the use of Culture in a greatly expanded sense is recent and uncertain (it meant something like "civilisation" in the 18th Century but became destabilised in the 19th). Its use among angry poets seems to be totalised, with no boundaries of time or place; it is the everything of "everything is wrong as it was then and as it is now and you're all to blame". Or it means "everything that I don't like about where I am". The trickery is in the attempt to exclude yourself from it.
Well I don't expect I'll dissuade you, Tim, from your convictions. I wouldn't want to, But neither will I ever be persuaded again to surrender a sense of the realities of what happens, for that old new-world protest sloganing (I don't accuse Tim of this) which denigrates the entire context in which we live, including a social set-up and a commerce without which we'd be finished, wouldn't we? Of course there is a lot wrong with it, some times more than at other times. And it does concern poetry, down to the syllable. It's a matter of language use, trying to make a habit of accuracy in all departments as best we can. (I don't for instance much like that use of the term "the rich"). Also that writing a poem about daffodils (which I think everyone should) does not make you complicit in large-scale harm.
I'd rather have written this so that it didn't slip and slide so from one hefty proposition to another.
