Doug wrote
>There just aren't any rules about what
> kinds of poetry can be written in any one age -- all that business about our
> powerlessness and the retreat of politics into realms far beyond our ability
> to affect it makes no difference at all to the central argument, which is one
> of ethics not results.
and
>we keep getting snagged on a pretended distinction between
>"poltiical poetry" (= rants) versus "poetry", whose political effect
>is oblique.
and
> AGAIN, that doesn't mean that we have to seek actual political results from a
> poem, though if on some occasion we think we should then, dammit,
>we should do so.
It seems to me that the basic assumptions behind the idea (in the
first quote) attacked by Doug are the founding (metaphysical)
assumptions of the affirmed second and third quotes. The supposed
modernist trap as formulated by Peter comes
to its terms by negotiation with the invention of the foreclosed
possibility of an effective and public voice. Doug`s own position
maintains a difference between a poetry that (to my mind) dreams
an effect of effectiveness by being relatively "accessible", and a
poetry which forecloses its own effective and public possibility, by
being "difficult". This correlates with the classic metaphysical
gesture as diagnosed by you-know-who...maintenance of a distinction
between agora-appropriate-and-effective `speech` and its secondary,
derivative representation, writing. Such a maintenance cannot but
manoeuvre Poetry into Peter`s boxed-in parking-space, if we accept
that Poetry distils and concentrates those effects of language
which are filtered off in the service of a relatively stable and
transparent model of communication.
What has to happen during the
movement from the "difficult" pole to the "accessible" pole (both
greasy) may well rule out in advance the effectiveness of the
sought-after effectiveness, by ruling out any coincident
interrogation of the concepts the poetry seeks to deploy. (For
me, the best parts of Prynne`s work, from Not-You on, combine
references to and with some sort of politico-economic analysis and
commitment, with a questioning of the politics which waits upon
referentiality, and the limits to the quality of its own analysis and
commitment.)
This, I think, chimes with certain parts of Keston`s work. Where I
would depart from Keston`s account is...that Keston`s `Prynne`
is more resolutely metaphysical than the collection of texts called
by that name. I don`t have the text in front of me, of course, but
the entire Husserlian section, which refers to Poetry`s "accidental
reference to the form of time" (apologies if this is wrong, K., I`m
working from memory and radically unsure if I`ve even understood the
passage, but for the sake of argument...) assumes that there is some
thing that refers, and some thing that it refers to (which is
susceptible to the "form/content" opposition). Entirely
metaphysical, the argument ensures that Poetry enjoys the ability to
be what it is, even as the argument seeks to explain some sort of
fecund and/but latent futurity which belongs to or constitutes the
object of the discourse. This has the pleasing consequence of
permitting an original and originary `site` to be delimited, called
`Prynne`, which, even as it is cast and casts itself into the
unknowable, enables `Prynne` to take the credit for each and every
twist and turn the texts are (not) bound to take, the credit for what
`he` cannot possibly predict. Akin, in other words, to the touching
faith in, and tributes to, `Prynne` exhibited by John Wilkinson
elsewhere, and elsewhere discussed by me.
Keston`s earliest posting of his definition of the movement of
Poetry, before it was collected in the entire (and brilliant, despite
what I`m saying) essay, prompted a response that suspected the
definition was tailor-made to guarantee a boundless credit to the
texts of Prynne, to their integrity. My own position is, I don`t
come to praise, don`t come to bury. Re: Derrida on Husserl, if the
texts` effect of presence is derived from an originary trace which
means that they are never exactly identical with "themselves", and if
Prynne, as some sort of tutelary God, is not there to ABSOLUTELY
predetermine our readings, I would wish to suppress the urge to
praise, to blame, (as barely relevant) in favour of a more
problematic, more slippery, but more politicised attempt to establish
the extent of authorial responsibility for the readings I can most
plausibly pursue, without genuflecting whenever I detect The (Effect
of) Presence, and without immediately dropping what I`m doing when I
don`t detect &c.
robin
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|