From: n2412@cray.com (Joe Green)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: Re: The Business of Poetry
Date: 17 Apr 92 20:02:10 GMT
Article-I.D.: hemlock.1992Apr17.150210.1954
Organization: Cray Research, Inc.

In article <1992Apr16.184830.2335@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov> sharon@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov (Sharon Hopkins) writes:
>In article <1992Apr14.111012.15933@hemlock.cray.com> n2412@cray.com (Joe Green) writes:
>>In article <1992Apr13.224607.15440@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov> sharon@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov (Sharon Hopkins) writes:
>>
>>>No:  I don't buy the "transformation".  The "great machine" transformed
>>>real bodies into real fertilizer, and longs lists of names on church walls.
>>
>>Yes.  But to reproduce itself it then transformed them into metaphors
>>of the usual sort -- it used them to insure a fresh supply of bodies.
>
>You speak of war as a living being, with goals, actions, etc.:  "it then
>transformed" "it used" -- war seemed a machine, even perhaps a living
>organism, seen from the trenches.  But that was perception.  War, too, is
>an event organized by people.  Not independent.  No more than poetry is.

Of course not -- a consequence of grammar. This doesn't imply that
I fantasize an autonomy. 


>
>>The pun on lie not accidental.  The nursery rhyme recalled.
>>Never anything but whatchamacallums -- symbolic markers and
>>not real bodies to the "machine."  A last beer and forgotten
>>forever by the "machine" because never anything but that which
>>exists to be forgotten. 
>
>Never real enough to most of the people forgetting, to be remembered.
>
>>Perhaps these were the sentiments of some -- the old glory, the loss
>>of self in something greater but the war was nothing but
>>tedious exchange -- our thousnads in front of the trenches, their
>>thousands in front of the trenches.  Wilfred Owen -- but what
>>did his poetry prevent?  maybe saved a few.  Yes.
>
>Yes, but more.  Provided remembrance -- so that even I can see the faces,
>remember bodies had names.  Sometimes the appropriation makes the dead
>immortal, not the poet (or not just).  Without the metaphor, how do we
>hold the memory?
>
>>>Crud, I left the Millay book at home.  The last line of the
>>>poem I'm wanting:  "this tall, oblivious gaoler eyed with stars."
>>
>>No -- not the universe as gaoler -- that is a familiar projection.
>>The gaoler is within, I think and hope.
>
>I'll post a copy later.  Voluntary servitude the point, and why.

Voluntary a word that could be quibbled endlessly.



>
>>>I don't attempt it often, with poetry, unless to suggest that people live,
>>>and love, and hope, and hurt, and eventually die (one way or another).
>>>Even icky people.  A very conservative, measured, quiet sort of politics.  
>>
>>Yes -- and maybe the gift you intend is really a gift.  This is what I
>>mean and this is what happens in a gift economy.  The everydayness
>>of it all, the smallness are part of what I admire.
>
>Then why, with such then vehemence, "Now everyone shall concentrate on
>producing a nice sestina about the ambiguity of their little lives" ?


But the banal is not the ordinary.  The ordinary is what resists the
banal and what is supressed by it.  I like poetry about the ordinary
and dislike poetry overcome by the banal.  Hence my comment.




>
>The everyday is a kind of power, inertia is power.  These are of the type
>of the power women have had, women with a voice in small things, in home,
>children, husband, even when without the larger power of Politics, of
>wealth, of political action, of Independence.  Many people have little
>lives, ambiguity, dullness.  Joyce's "A Little Cloud".  Shall we not speak
>to the dullness, to the drab, to the human life and fire even in banality?


It seems like power, doesn't it and provides a kind of consolation?
But when instructed to suffer (by whatever and no special metaphysical
entity is implied) they will.  A room of one's own in a slaughterhouse
-- there is, at least, that. 

>
>I would not trade away my larger voice, more recently gained, but the
>small voice of the ordinary was not silent, was not nothing.  Ask a
>grandmother if *her* grandmother was powerless, voiceless, silent.
>

I don't have to ask a grandmother.  I can ask millions by -- for
example -- glancing at the number of the powerless and voiceless
killed in this or that war or enslaved.  The fact that they were
once able to chat among themselves while enslaved or before
being slaughtered is nice to remember but asserting that
there was any real power there seems wrong.    

>--
>
>Since I bitched about poem content, another repost:  the only sestina I've
>written thus far.  Ambiguous, but not as little as it might be, nor as
>ordinary, nor as much about my life.
>
>I really wanted to post an excellent poem by a friend of mine, about children
>and writing and telephones, but I haven't a copy handy and it isn't mine to
>give away just now.  This will have to do.
>
>
>	Sestina:  For Brendan
>
>	It still surprises me there are no scars
>	to ridge the muscled smoothness of your back
>	with maps of blows received, of battles won
>	by fighting on, ignoring body's pain.
>	Your mother might still recognize her son
>	in form and feature, in unchanging face.
>
>	Does inner sight make aging hard to face?
>	I cannot see, but still may guess what scars
>	lie buried deep within.  The circling sun
>	will never change its course or fling me back
>	to learn first-hand the causes of your pain--
>	in this Time's daughter, Loneliness, has won.
>
>	But worlds are misalligned, so sometimes one
>	small scrap of life, the truth behind a face,
>	can slip across that space and speak of pain
>	to fools and poets, etching others' scars
>	on sighted minds and hearts; though somewhere back
>	across the gap there shines a different sun.
>
>	It mocked you on the day you lost your son;
>	no battles fought, no bitter victories won
>	can serve you now, or bring lost sweetness back.
>	And you, alone, each passing day must face
>	an empty house, cold hearth, your inner scars
>	stretched tight across the ache of hidden pain.
>
>	But what went first?  Whence came that older pain
>	that some days lets you live as if no son
>	had ever crossed your doorstep?  Whence those scars
>	that hid your heart from how to love the one
>	whose need for love was greatest?  I would face
>	your demons with you, help to draw you back
>
>	from that abyss of loss.  But you are back
>	across the gulf of worlds, and all your pain
>	won't bring me more than dreams--to touch your face
>	still lies beyond my power.  I'll bear no son
>	to share with you; my wishing has not won
>	a way for me to cross our bridge of scars.
>
>	I cannot touch your scars, nor see your face,
>	for you are back, beneath that distant sun:
>	and I have won just this, to share your pain.
>
>
>					    Claremont, CA
>					    Spring, 1989
>
>--Sharon Hopkins
>  sharon@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov


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