Keith of course I agree that there's no 'pure space', but wouldn't take
this to mean that one shouldn't be prepared to discriminate between
available spaces; so again, we disagree on the extent to which context is
determining, and not in principle. Or perhaps that disagreement does in
fact entail a principle, as you imply. You seem to equate compassion with
intervention, or with interjection at least. Would you find Peter Riley's
violent antipathy to commenting on the Yugoslavian situation
dispassionate? He was overtly prescriptive as I recall, and felt that
like himself, all poets should refrain from comment, which he took to be
necessarily egregious and offensive. I disagree with Peter, but would be
interested to hear on which grounds you'd differentiate his response from
mine.
Yet also I'd want to distinguish my attitude, as I myself perceive it,
from how you characterize it. I don't believe that all publishing is
evil, and that the nation should be left to sit out its ignorance without
assistance from those with access to the resources of literary production.
Not at all. What I desire is rather a context for popular publishing
which is properly indicative of the debate and reactive self-positioning
which in part constitute the field of poetic output; that is, an anthology
(for example) which doesn't seek to redress intellectual diremption
through simple, positivistic equalization of poetic careers, but which
makes a scruple of identifying its own violence in representing sections
of work which have been developed in fundamental rejection of just such a
scheme. So, were I to edit an anthology in which (say) John Wilkinson
appeared alongside Seamus Heaney, I would want not merely to provide some
brief critical exordium stating that my principle of selection had been
eclectic, but to provide a space for comment for each poet in the book, in
which they could register their own anxieties, satisfactions or
indifference at appearing in such a context. This is the kind of book
that I -would- want to promote to every reader, though as I said earlier I
would have reservations regarding its reifying effect on actual debate.
So: it's not that I feel compassionate simply in wishing to stop readers
from getting at the resources which I enjoy, or from expanding their
interest in commodities I do not enjoy. Rather: I would feel
compassionate in presenting a book which argued explicitly that
anthological eclecticism is a myth of corporate endeavour, because such a
book would be more accurately representative of (eg) the tensions on such
a list as this one, where we've seen over the years such figures as
Hughes, Heaney, Armitage etc regularly abused and deprecated. Why pretend
that the nation's poetry is just one big synthesis of aesthetic variants?
What about the real circumstances of disagreement that -- outside of
anthologies -- precisely constitute the historic obstacle to such a
synthesis?
To offer an anthology in the hope of arguing ingenuously for a synthesis,
either current or predicatble, would in my view be dispassionate. Moving
from page to page is NOT moving from position to position. If my position
on this issue seems fixed, perhaps this is because no poetic labour is
currently satisfying its criteria. Or perhaps I should abandon my
position simply in order to be able to claim that my outlook is evidence
of a theoretic pluralism.
I mentioned Heidegger since his seems to be, of recent views of poetry,
one of the most exaltative and teleological. I refer particularly to his
treatment of Holderlin as a destiny for mankind. Obviously I have
considerable difficulties with such a view etc. But Heidegger's view of
'dignity' is something which I'd sniff at only cautiously (an interesting
passage on Humanism -- that it sets the dignity of humankind too low --
in the recently published CUP Wegmerken).
k
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