Dear BPs,

I keep trying to close down for Christmas BUT----


>[PR writes
>a course in elementary logic and the meaning of words compulsory for
>all poets, or at least all those who intend to talk about it.
>If only logic and meaning held The Answer. What a comfortable world we
>would live in.
>No nasty messy bits. No slurpy unmeanings - no twisting interpretations,
>all logical. Dictionaries are a hedge against disaster - a vain attempt to
>stem the tide of chaos of utterance and interpretation.

My experience is that on the contrary the rational or grounding demand
implied by "logic and meaning" make it more difficult and more rewarding
and a lot less comfortable. It is actually a work-demand without which we
slide not into creative primordial chaos but into utterly conventionalised
modes of ignorance and sea-drift.  The use of the dictionary (on the shelf
or in the head) is to DE-conventionalise utterance and make it accurate.

I don't want to start up one of those awful discussions about semantics. As
far as I 'm concerned there are working assumptions about language which
you abandon at your peril, and i don't see why they should be different for
poetry than for anything else.  Walk into a fish and chip shop wanting
plaice and chips, abandon meaning and logic, and you'll probably walk out
with egg foo-yung.

Mess and chaos are simply useless. The left in poetry and politics has
suffered from the infantile belief in them for something like a century,
which is why they have got nowhere and had no effect except where they have
pulled themselves together and sought clarity. Mess destroyed Pound's work,
and Olson's after him, and many similar. I don't see the point of willing
yourself into failure.

Mess and chaos are narrow, divisive, static, impoverished and culturally
limited.  Logic  as method actually opens out imaginative vistas, actually
gets the world moving.  (I think this might  be a tenet of the "Cambridge"
school of poetry if such a thing existed, which it certainly doesn't. )

All injustice is illogical (see MacIntyre, "Whose Justice" on the
complications of this).  The visionary irrationality that Pound cultivated
dragged him into the dangerous injustice of anti-Semitism (the use of
meaningless categories again).

And so on. My points are obvious and don't need elaborating.   But this is
interesting and gets to the heart of a lot of the disagreements that haunt
this channel. If we go for this in a cool and clear tone we could really
sort something out.  I understand and sympathise with the desire to break
confines, and I know there's a very narrow and vicarious way of enforcing
logicality which we've seen quite a lot of too around here this year.  I've
lived with the poetical left and it's constant splintering  caused, as I
see it, by willed alienation, for thirty years and I'm still interested to
hear ANY argument or promise of result which justifies its apparent
isolationist refusals. In my experience all the achievement and all the
life in these activities has entered  from outside poetry or the arts from
improvement zones (in ecology, politics, sundries human studies) operating
rationally towards clarified aims.  Without logic you can't reach result at
all.

I just think people are using the wrong terms, cultivating
non-understanding  and febrility, and write themselves into a trap where
you end up denigrating [that's a bad word actually]  the very tools which
might save us from decadence--- not just Logic and Lexis but also (in the
Introduction to Other for instance) Justice and Virtue themselves. Surely
that leaves you without basis, without any Reason to continue and no target
in sight except solipsistic somnambulism.



(By the way the subject headings for these debates have become so
variegated and illogical, changing many times within one discussion or
staying the same over ten different matters, and the archive must be in
total chaos trying to categorise them, so I've decided to use the same
subject heading for everything I write, "Wine Bottles")


Which brings us back to reality.


Lang may y' all warble.


/PR




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