I sense one of those desiccated debates looming, that leave everyone feeling burnt-out. Will be brief, anyway, responding to
Tim.
1) The quote from McClatchy is revealing; his defensive dismissal of the language poets
et al. assumes a readership that even knows who they are, a readership which is extremely tiny. The forces of PR & publication & renown on both the "official" & the marginal wings are hyper-miniscule; the internal debate only highlights the extremely minor role poetry plays in the culture we have. The forces of fame & publication on either side of the mirror
operate in exactly the same way; in both cases their impact is negligible. In this context, the official/marginal binary is merely a distraction from the real difficulties of making poetry.
2) The idea of a center of humane values is only a "red herring" if you can't see that center. The fact is there is a very basic social contract operating in most countries : a collectivity so basic, so domestic, so in front of our noses, that we sometimes fail to notice it. It goes something like this :
if you work hard, get an education, take care of yourself & your family, you will do well. This kind of comment of course will invite all kinds of outcries along the lines of,
well, what about these
social injustices? My assertion was not, "there is a center, therefore the problems are unimportant." Remember, my assertion was: "corrections of injustices will come from the center of humane values".
3) Tim would like to portray my position as that of a deracinated aesthetician. I think it goes something more like this : politics is too important to be reduced to literary
movement styles and phony frames of literary progress. By the same token, poetry is too essential to be subjected to the same partisan-ideological branding & feathering. In fact, poetry is too powerful to be confined by right-thinking intellectualizations or over-neat stylizations. It's powerful because rooted in experience, emotion and immediacy of perception; it's the working-out (through a desperate and often instinctive commitment to song) of conflicts which are too personal for abstract philosophical formulae; as Mandelstam emphasized, poetry is much more
raw than prose. In making this argument I am leaving aside the most essential aspect, since raising it only instigates more arguments : poetry is an artistic activity, its effects operate on the aesthetic plane. Yes, the artist will be engaged in the social struggles which he or she inherits; yes, these will be reflected in the themes, styles, ethics of the art work; but, yet, & however,
these social, political, philosophical beliefs and commitments, in the context of the art work, have no effect or meaning whatsoever, unless the art work is effective as art. How poetry
works in this way is not something that can be explained by simple rules & instructions, or right-thinking ideological positions.*
*p.s. And these last two sentences, if you accept them, are the strongest argument for the poet's attention, not only to their private affinities, but to the tradition-at-large. The achievement of great poems is a general human achievement; they suffuse culture, take on a "second life", in Montale's sense; they are classics, in the sense that they open a door to general reception by means of their inherent quality. This general notion of classicism is perhaps something like what Mandelstam meant when he defined acmeism as "nostalgia for world culture". These classic achievements form a bond with that center of normative humane values which is civilization; the world culture Mandelstam wrote about in another place as that time when the worthless paper currency of the present (in his case, under Stalinism) is replaced by the ringing gold
florins of a universal humanism, which will be passed from hand to hand. This same sense of wide, general heritage is what Brodsky was referring to when he wrote that "Man was put on the earth to make civilization."
