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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 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%