The question, is there a political efficiency in poetry, which if it is to
begin without rigging the game must take 'political' to mean 'material' and
probably even 'economic' rather than allowing it to miscarriage in the
reiterated intialization of mere 'reflective,' seems to me to incur the
(perhaps encompassing) question, can poetry be other than metaphysical?  Is
there an artificial access to practicality from contemplative leisure that
is characterized exclusively by its occurrence through reading verse, or is
any such 'poetic' access simply a distinguished instance of a more general
inclination, one that might have discovered near-wholly non-linguistic
provocations with equal and in fact -identical- alacrity?  Because, after
all, no-one would deny that reading a poem -can- make a person consider her
situation and even prompt that person to act to her or others' advantage or
disadvantage (Byron and the Greeks, eg, or patronised productions aimed
explicitly at securing continued patronage, eg); but is this decision to
act one which is essentially responsive to what the poetry of that poem is,
or is it the expression of a desire to reify private experience publically
that, in itself, occurs as the result of a private encounter with a great
number of commodities - with newspapers, adverts, propagandistic images of
suffering, cookbook recipes, do-it-yourself guidebooks?  I have argued
elsewhere - in a post to this list, in fact, several months ago - that
poetry does not make things happen, but that it promotes a platform for
valued content and that that content might very well cause any number of
events, without arrogating to its platform the status of a materially
distinct political efficiency.  This argument is outlined in the addendum
to the notes on Prynne that I posted a couple of weeks ago.  The
anti-metaphysical rhetoric of (for example) Lukacs' historical materialism
does seem, to me, to gloss over what I take to be a quite elementary
condition of dialectics - that its difference from metaphysics is a largely
metaphysical difference, and that any Marxist emphasis on a totality ought
to accommodate this latter metaphysics with some acknoweldgment of
dependency; similarly, the possibly dialectical character of the contents
of poems and of the events which those contents might come to be seen to
have promoted, was itself promoted by a platform which contrives to
legitimate the value of such contents in an entirely metaphysical manner. 
So I say, no.  Poetry is not political, or at least is not politically
distinct, other than in the way that everything in society has a minimal
political distinction merely by being named.  But I'd rather be roused by
Brecht than by Branflakes, and I can carry this proclivity to the poems I
read, bestow it upon them as a personally determined legitimacy, as long as
I recognise the superficiality of any supposedly intrinsic political
efficiency and choose to have to choose for myself.

The way I see it, this makes it severely improbable that many poems will be
legitimated as poltically efficient, by me; legitimacy does depend upon the
theory of some kind of auratic infrequency, for me at least.      


Keston          


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