On Tue, 14 Mar 2000, pain wrote:
> For example how one reads a poem read by a friend, another
> local poet, an avant-garde poet, a mainstream poet, and one from the
> canon --all differ. Why? Because in the former one has more at stake than
> the poetry, in the second it is to do with being in a group, the third to do
> with one's credentials as a poet in public, and as for the mainstream poet
> and poets from the canon -- well one can be honest and say what one thinks.
- ?? I'm aghast at the shallowness of these assumptions. As I was trying
to sketch out in my post yesterday, which Stephen's overlooked because it
doesn't suit his sniping, whilst I can't say how "one" reads, any more
than the insidious "we" which was previously on offer, I can say how _I_
attempt to read - and that when I pick up a text I try to adapt my reading
response to be that most appropriate to the text - not the status or
ecological niche of the poet, but the text. Different skills are involved
in each of the different examples I cited, and, of course, in a range of
other poetries which I didn't refer to - and I do my best to deploy them,
and resent the shallowness which assumes that I'd do other. I don't
believe this practice of open reading is unique, or even that I do it
particularly well. I know enough others on this list (and off it) who
could give a similar account of their practice, and I bet they're brassed
off by the sheer ignorance which lies behind such shallowness. "being
honest and saying what one one thinks" are the shallowest defences of the
ill-developed thought behind these assumptions.
> If people attack the mainstream poets
> and poets of the canon, then they should allow themselves to be accessible
> to the same criticism -- however this is not the case, because they are
> protective, sensitive, fragile and ...avant-garde.
- No: this is just silly, and I can't discount the possibility that it's
vindictively so. Devoid of specifics, it seeks to stand as a general
reproof, but has no currency to do so, other than as a generalised and
unworthy slur. _Who_ is criticising-but-not-allowing-criticism Stephen?
Unapplied, it's an accusation which is as likely to refer to your own
inability to respond to criticism of your own poems as anything else.
In a post from Tony Baker the other day I have the record of how one more
open poet responds to a text, and I reproduce it with his permission:
On Tue, 7 Mar 2000, Tony Baker wrote:
> & of course my reaction is unavoidably smack
> in the middle of that performative thing - I actually don't know what a
> thing is without a "performance", so I sneak off into quiet corners of
> the house to mutter out loud if I want to really 'hear' anything. & as
> soon as you do that - which I suppose only "performers" do, & critics
> don't (& a whole bundle of poets I sometimes think) - you know that
> whatever integrity a thing has goes through an utterly sensual world. I
> don't honestly think we can ever know much that doesn't pass through the
> physiology - we see what a thing means, or we miss it.
Just one approach out of many - but how much _richer_, more _vital_ and
_responsive_ it is than the crabbed, narrow, failed-anthropology of
Stephen's paragraph quoted above.
RC
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