Wednesday, February 13, 2008
I think...
Your poetics are an inherently political stance in the same sense that signing an online petition makes you an activist. If you're taking a stand no one cares about against something no one cares about, how fucking political can it really be?
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All human activity is political, in the sense that it takes place in a context -- the context of other human actions, the context of the accumulated and collective history of other human actions, the context of the possible consequences of human actions (which may be difficult to forecast with precision sometimes).
To my thinking, the question you're raising here is about the content -- and, growing out of that, the relevance to the world at large -- of the politics and the poetics.
A couple of random hypothetical examples, just to illustrate:
To advocate a poetics that says that poetry written in a mix of English and Spanish, for example, should be considered to have as much literary merit, on average, as poetry written entirely in English -- to advocate this, in the context of raging public corporate "news" media hysteria about immigration into the United States -- is, I would say, an inherently political stance, and one that bears -- at least potentially -- real significance and relevance to the world at large.
On the other hand, to define a spectrum of poetries as (for example) the Post-Avant, and to define another spectrum of poetries as (for example) the School of Quietude, and then to argue (for example) that the former is a literary approach which is on the face of it superior to the latter approach -- this, to my thinking, is also a political stance, though perhaps of only slight significance and relevance to the world at large.
Just off the top of my head.
I like provocative posts like yours here. Thanks for posting this.
To my thinking, the question you're raising here is about the content -- and, growing out of that, the relevance to the world at large -- of the politics and the poetics.
A couple of random hypothetical examples, just to illustrate:
To advocate a poetics that says that poetry written in a mix of English and Spanish, for example, should be considered to have as much literary merit, on average, as poetry written entirely in English -- to advocate this, in the context of raging public corporate "news" media hysteria about immigration into the United States -- is, I would say, an inherently political stance, and one that bears -- at least potentially -- real significance and relevance to the world at large.
On the other hand, to define a spectrum of poetries as (for example) the Post-Avant, and to define another spectrum of poetries as (for example) the School of Quietude, and then to argue (for example) that the former is a literary approach which is on the face of it superior to the latter approach -- this, to my thinking, is also a political stance, though perhaps of only slight significance and relevance to the world at large.
Just off the top of my head.
I like provocative posts like yours here. Thanks for posting this.
Honestly, this is the kind of post I usually regret after making it because it's pretty flippant. Oh well...
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