>Je est un autre: but both the 'je' & the 'autre' have a life &
>times.

Yes: but there are two quite separate issues.  Issue one is the Scandal 
of the Jacket, which seems to me a joke which lightly satirises the 
marketing of publishers, and perhaps should be seen as no more (and maybe 
no less) than that; issue two is the question of a poet's embeddedness in 
his/her historical present, and his/her historical presence.  

I'm quite willing to conceive of them as linked, but I absolutely refuse 
to believe they are the same things.  In fact, given the marketing-driven 
hagiographies complained of so frequently around here, I'm astounded they 
can be thought of as the same.

And, far from denying the ambiguous physical existence of the Poet, which 
presence a lot of my own work deals with, I was saying how much the 
culture of celebrity obscures the Poet him/herself.  The Poet, that is, 
embodied in the Poet's work (which may, Geraldine, well include readings 
and performances).  Nor was I saying that biography was a priori a load 
of hogwash, simply that in our consumerist-oriented society it usually 
is, substituting a digestible personality for the contradictions and 
difficulties of work itself.  The idea that biography gives a magic key 
to meaning seems to me obviously rubbish.  

I would have thought it would also be obvious what I meant by the 
misleadingness of "biographical readings".  Eg: there was a scandal some 
years ago because a biography came out of Brecht which revealed that _he 
didn't write all of his own plays_, causing all sorts of anguish to those 
who subscribed to the idea of the solitary genius; but this idea was 
never one Brecht subscribed to as a theatre writer, and all his plays 
acknowledge his collaborators.  But somehow, at least in this country, 
this meant that his plays were no longer "authentic", because they no 
longer revealed some stable romantic Genius self, and because Brecht was 
a nasty person anyway (as if you wouldn't know, from reading his poems 
and plays).  I'm saying is that reading works as encoded biographies in 
order to confer some kind of value of authenticity upon them, a reading 
which (again, here) seems pretty well the dominant approach, seems to me 
just plain wrong, and ultimately deeply damaging to poetry itself.

None of this denies the value of a tactful reading which acknowledges the 
tenuous relationships and multiple elisions between an art and a life; 
and more importantly, the impossibilities of really knowing the interiors 
of another life.  But I would venture that such a reading has little to 
do with marketing.  And "authenticity", however you define it, _has_ to 
emerge from the work itself.  Otherwise, why bother reading it?

Cheers

Alison












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