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The danger of a language of external objects and relations is conformity and the danger of a
language of thought processes is fiddling while Rome burns. The most powerful poetry, I suspect.
will take both kinds of risk. Just read Roy Fisher's The Furnace which moves, flickers, between the
nature of perception and the city in front of him. (That's what I call adventurous, never mind
Bloodaxe.)
The other, related dichotomy I want to bring up is the one of care and insouciance. Taking care in
one's activity and relations is the human duty but it seems that the poet needs to experience a fair
degree of personal insouciance in order to do any interesting work with language. An example (sort
of): I was preparing to write a few careful lines in defence of Bloodaxe until I read Keston's
utterly disarming, "egregious tinsel of the entertainment industry".
Plato was right, and Chris. But maybe it will wear off soon.
Anne
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