Geraldine
>
>Peter, Alison, pardon me
>for living and having the audacity to open my trap when
>what comes out isn't what you want to come out (this
>is not a cynical response it's a pissed-fucking-off
>response ).
Too tired and pissed off myself to respond adequately, although of course
I pardon you, and have no doubt you would have the audacity to open your
mouth whenever and however you pleased. I was also asking a question,
and wasn't simply responding to you, but to the tenor of the whole
discussion. I didn't mean it to degenerate into a brawl, and I should be
sorry if undying emnity should now rear its head, &c. By which I mean,
happy birthday: and that makes you a Virgo, like me.
I don't ask myself if a poet is unpleasant when I read the work,
otherwise I'd cut my reading material in half. I've had too much
pleasure from MacDiarmid to dismiss him. Which doesn't mean I approve of
everything he wrote, or would want to write that way myself. No Hymns to
Lenin from me.
An aside on the pissedoffedness. I went to the Australia Council Vision
Day yesterday. I've never been so close to so much crap in my life: next
to this the most posturing of MacDiarmid's poetry is a thing aye of
purest beauty. The only defence was to be vocal, so vocal I was: at
least that way I wouldn't come home feeling shamed within myself. I
still feel that I've somehow been poisoned. If nothing else, it
demonstrated to me how quickly writing itself can vanish under the rubble
of corporate jargon, only to emerge transformed as a commodity shorn of
everything except its potential consumablity. How nicely it all
happens, in clean smoke-free rooms far far away from the filth and
passion of human contact.
So now I know I'm a romantic, an idealist and I want to change the world,
because that's what I was told. No need to explain the perjorative edge
of all those appellations. Head-in-the-clouds me. No, I just want a
world where poetry, and all the aspects of consciousness it calls on,
exists. A realist down to my bootstraps, I think that can only happen if
writing is thought of as something other than a commodity.
But everyone here knows this. Poetry stepped sideways long ago, and me,
I think that's fine. Margins are often the strongest place to be.
Best
Alison
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|