tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6587090106923596284.post5773611165011841017..comments2023-04-20T18:18:11.438+01:00Comments on Gists & Piths: 'lyric urgency' vs. 'stratified histories of place' (Skoulding)Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6587090106923596284.post-66834418377095791102012-09-13T10:07:08.360+01:002012-09-13T10:07:08.360+01:00Hi Oliver, apologies for slow reply, been away and...Hi Oliver, apologies for slow reply, been away and mostly unplugged. <br /><br />Increasingly I'm drawn to the question of the y-axis of the political compass: liberal vs. authoritarian. Only an idiot, for example, would reject a [right- or left-wing] capitalist-produced solution to energy resource shortages which can unhitch from the fossil fuel wagon, on the grounds that they are in political disagreement with the source of a solution (if you believe in the need for a solution, or the possibility of, yadda yadda [endless modulation, &c.]).<br /><br />So, my bad for over-simplifying, but it was a kind of thinking out loud. You're right about the nuance in Keats and I like the Paulin point - I once argued that Dickinson's 'Snake' (http://www.online-literature.com/dickinson/455/) was about getting stoned - and who knows what she really got up to in that room all by herself all day? Teenagers will be teenagers...<br /><br />At the same time (<i>pronounced loudly, like a portly fellow</i>) you could say that the traditional execution of a form like the sonnet, when done according to the strictures of past, recognised forms, is conservative (small c), rather than things like the Reality Street Book of Sonnets, which is experimental (small 'e'?).<br /><br />The distinction between these approaches is a y-axis distinction from a narrow perspective only - that liberalism permits more room for experimentation and individual expression, when centre/periphery is examined. Less centralised control. Authoritarianism may attempt to enforce a radical social dynamic through structural violence, etc. but perhaps there's something to be said for the centre-periphery split?<br /><br />Somewhere out of this a more useful comment might emerge about the idea of 'edges', or 'edgelands'. I've not read the Farley/Roberts book yet, but Jonathan Skinner is very interesting on the topic.<br /><br />Also, this came to me recently, you might find it interesting:<br />http://newleftreview.org/II/74/t-j-clark-for-a-left-with-no-future<br /><br />Best,<br /><br />George @ G&PThe Editorshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06264669059410810775noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6587090106923596284.post-89672745115215456422012-08-21T13:06:13.220+01:002012-08-21T13:06:13.220+01:00Hi George and Simon,
Fascinating line of argume... Hi George and Simon,<br /> Fascinating line of argument and as you say one which opens out a great many questions about the underlying politics of poetic process and curricularisation. <br /> I agree with Simon that we need to be pretty circumspect when characterising texts as leftist/rightist; for example, equating disjunctive 'open' form with radicalism and metrical 'closed' form with conservatism, as people like Ron Silliman consistently do when discussing 'Post-Avant' and 'Quietist' schools of his own invention.<br /> Just to pick up on your thoughts about Keats, however. It could equally be argued that in spite of his youth Keats was a highly self-reflexive poet with a more developed sense of "the concepts feeding his poems" (as evinced by the sophisticated self-dialogue about poetry and language in the Letters)than perhaps any other English poet. A lot of his poems are either about poetry (eg Sonnet on the Sonnet or "When I have fears that I may cease to be") or as in the Odes, complex meditations on how formal coherence and temporal flux interrelate.<br /> And although he uses prosody which is conventional for its time (like all the other Romantics with the exception of Blake), Keats' politics were avowedly leftist. Andrew Motion's biog (far better than any poetry he's ever written) shows how his poetry subtly intersects with the social reality of its time, as well as reminding us that Keats' ambition before he fell ill with tuberculosis was to become a Hazlitt-like radical journalist. <br /> If you ever take Tom Paulin seriously (which I rarely do) he argues that the whole of 'To Autumn' is an encrypted lambasting against the Peterloo massacre - pretty silly idea but there might be an iota of truth in it ( another interpretation of that poem is as a Clare-like lament for the commonland around Winchester appropriated by private owners...)<br /> Sorry I'm rambling now but you get my drift.<br />All the best,<br /> Oliveroliver dixonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16774946654679950665noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6587090106923596284.post-77448581572558947742012-08-21T09:42:38.523+01:002012-08-21T09:42:38.523+01:00Hi Simon,
I guess I'm separating out differen...Hi Simon,<br /><br />I guess I'm separating out different versions of history. The simplistic view, that equates liberalism with leftist politics, has taken hold more since 1979, given the lack of left-leaning politics in the UK. It's a simplification which I intended to imply can be thrown out by a closer look at specific poetry and poetics.<br /><br />That's why I opened the discussion up at the end - I'm particularly interested in reading suggestions. As far as bandying around terms - yes, that's the point. The trigger for the piece was trying to liberalise the ideas I had, by not imposing.<br /><br />Wordsworth is an interesting case, with a fairly rigid conservatism complicated by an attempt to give voice to disempowered 'rustics'. So his poetry is more interesting to me, in my advancing years, than that of Keats, who was inspirational, but didn't lead me to question the politics of what he presented.<br /><br />Ditto Clare, who I'm coming to realise approached his subjects with a troubling didacticism. He took up the mantle of 'working class poet' a little too readily and his early work is structurally very conformist, implying a right-leaning poetics. He's been celebrated by socialist critics (Williams, etc.) in a way that seems to me to uphold his life above the statements he makes, which, OK, have a degree of Gandhi-esque defensiveness, a resistance to agribusiness at the expense of the 'people of the land', but still enforces a rightness of hierarchy.<br /><br />See, this needs a lot more space and time than I can be bothered to take. That's what it is, really - laziness. Your point about Wendy Cope, for example: the poetry's structure works at odds with the more playful (perhaps liberal?) content of the poems. I like your metaphor about DNA vs. (what exactly?) flesh. It leads me into thinking about how popular work often lets more interesting light into its subtext through what was <i>not</i> intentional or controlled.<br /><br />George @ G&PThe Editorshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06264669059410810775noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6587090106923596284.post-52839236870035837132012-08-20T13:35:40.245+01:002012-08-20T13:35:40.245+01:00George,
In addition, I wondered if you could expa...George,<br /><br />In addition, I wondered if you could expand upon, or give some examples, of what you mean by 'leftist' and 'rightist' poetry? Without some kind of concrete illustrations, it seems rather arbitrary that you would associate 'leftism' with freedom and anti-authoritarianism, and 'rightism' with elitism and closure (is closure neccesarily 'elitist', by the way? The Cantos is a far more 'elitst' work than, say, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, but the former is infinitely more open in its structures and ideas than the latter), as if authoritarianism were somehow at odds with the DNA of the left? The only 'leftist' work that sprang to my mind was something along the lines of Adrian Mitchell or Harold Pinter, which is absolutely authoritarian in its attempt to lead its readers towards particular conclusions: there's no openness or play here at all, just bludgeoning propoganda. All of which is not to say that your analysis is wrong, I just wonder if you're bandying terms around without really getting to grips with their implications.<br /><br />Simon @ G&P The Editorshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06264669059410810775noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6587090106923596284.post-10843188159072667672012-08-18T10:30:56.090+01:002012-08-18T10:30:56.090+01:00George,
I'll come back to this piece when I&#...George,<br /><br />I'll come back to this piece when I've had a little more coffee, but I just wanted to put your mind at rest regarding your self-diagnosed gaps in the history of poetics: isn't that how all poets ultimately construct their poetics, their sense of their place in history? Look at Eliot, for example: he manages to construct a viable, even radical poetics by making a remarkable leap over the 18th and most of the 19th centuries, founding his own writing and critical analysis equally on Elizabethan drama, and French symbolism (Laforgue, Baudelaire, etc) [Pound does something similar with Medieval France / Italy and Browning]. It's a poetics, that is, which revels in its partisanship, its deliberately 'vast gaps' in history. That's how poetry moves on, really, through creative mis-readings.<br /><br />Oh, BTW, I watched Surviving Life last night, and it's as demented and maddening as I had hoped. More soon.<br /><br />Simon @ Gists and Piths The Editorshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06264669059410810775noreply@blogger.com