Ah...
AE - has it ever crossed your mind that your view of poetics is politically motivated from an underlying and unscrutinised belief that poetry is in some way that I fail to see divorced from social reality? If one is divorced from society then one has no shared cultural discourse with ones audience. Poetry speaks the language of its writer to the audience of choice - and mainly it is the literate elites.
Poetry is political - it always has been - in form, content and voice. Lyric poetry is the politics of one class - social antagonism and politcal struggle is the the politics of another. Poetry is manipulation - it is an extension of rhetoric and aims to convince the already convinced or those who hover marginally at its edges. In the end the first rule of rhetoric applies - who is the audience. Each is different for each poet and poem. Mainly, modern poetry has been written by those not caught up in the struggle for economic survival - the middle and upper classes. When poetry is written for the sphere of the working class it has a very long tradition of resistance - ballads and songs that go back as far as poetry itself. It was the record of the tribe in war in ancient Arabia, it was the song of the Englishman against the French classical forms introduced by the Norman Squirearchy, it was the ballad of the Welsh, Scottish and Irish against the hegemony of the English, and so on.
What I see here is an abject failure for people on this site to see that poetry is an extension of politics by other means, to misquote Von Clausewitz. Apoliticism is just as much a poltical stance - one of the rich white - they can afford to be apolitical - Wilbur is a prime example of this. He stands somewhere in the hinterland of American White-dominated Capitalism - gaining from it but not opposing it as it has done him no disfavours. I would categorise most readers of this board in this way (including, but to a lesser degree, myself).
Essentially it is a failure to see that the history of poetics is a history of politics - do you not think that the primary aim of the Illiad was to support the wider idea of Greek hegemony in Asia minor, to reimpose the idea that the Greek world was in some way intrinsicallly better able to spread its militarism and imperialism across the then known world? It is a tract first - a poem second.
I find the idea that a poem has to be a poem first and somethng else second faintly ludicrous - on whose terms? What should a poem be? What is a poem? We can't even agree that so to advance further from this untenable position is a little like building castles on sand. A poem has to be successful? In whose terms? A poem must... a poem is successful if
its audience believe it to be so. Rhetoric again. Any poem has a rhetorical gambit which it opens with the audience - it is why I dislike poems that take for granted that such and such is how the world works without ever asking questions to affirm that basic first principle - it is the world of 'nice poetry' - trite middleclassness that assumes the glass through which its world is viewed is the only one. That is not the case at all. The fact that working class ballads and songs are seen as superior as they do not engage in classical philosophy is elitist and political - there are many political songs and poems that are philosophically complex.
Moreover, it is absurd to say that something which fails to obey the dicta of middle class thought is somehow deficient - it all comes back to the argument on use - what is its use? Agit-prop poetry is for the raising of morale, against oppresiveness from the very class forces that support other areas of poetry - it is this social dialectic that propels the very antagonism between openly political poetry and that which hides its stygian light beneath a bushel. Agit-prop is for convincing those who are at the rough end of police beatings and scab labour that they should fight on -why does the middle class poet not write political poetry? His safe little world already has organised labour firmly whipped into place. Social relations have a comfortable edge - no people springing up demanding the overthrow of labour-capital. In modern day America, I see no socialists or anarchists - they were shot like Joe Hill and Sacco and Venzetti a very long time ago. Why is there any need for the financially secure poet of today to write about anything more than the pressing problems of love or the falling of leaves - death by bomb in one's house is another people's problem. Summary execution for breaking curfew is relegated to the days of the War of Independence, when those self-same 'terrorists' by modern standards overthrew their legal rulers.
Your failure to understand the history of politics viz poetics is absolute and one of the reasons that Americans generally speaking have no idea what is happening in the world - they are like Wilbur too busy navel-gazing in a comfortable world of poetic introspection.
A few links for you to check out - of course - no place for these in the political canon:
Come Out ye Black & Tans!
I was born on a Dublin street
Where the loyal drums did beat
And those bloody English feet
They walked all over us!
But every single night
When me Da would come home tight,
He'd invite the neighbours out
With this chorus:
Come out ye Black & Tans!
Come out and fight me like a man.
Show your wife how you won medals
Down in Flanders.
Tell her how the IRA
Made you run like hell away
From the green and lovely lanes
Of Killeshandra!
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Alive as you and me
Says I, "But Joe, you're ten years dead,"
"I never died," says he, "I never died," says he.
"In Salt Lake, Joe, by God," says I
Him standing by my bed,
"They framed you on a murder charge."
Says Joe, "But I ain't dead," says Joe, "But I ain't dead."
"The copper bosses shot you, Joe,
They killed you, Joe," says I.
"Takes more than guns to kill a man,"
Says Joe, "I didn't die," says Joe, "I didn't die."
And standing there as big as life
And smiling with his eyes
Joe says, "What they forgot to kill
Went on to organize, went on to organize."
"Joe Hill ain't dead," he says to me,
"Joe Hill ain't never died.
Where workingmen are out on strike
Joe Hill is at their side, Joe Hill is at their side."
"From San Diego up to Maine
In every mine and mill
Where workers strike and organize,"
Says he, "You'll find Joe Hill," says he, "You'll find Joe Hill."
"Because the clouds and the water are angry,
the four seas have great waves.
Because the wind and the thunder are angry,
the five continents shake".
Mao
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Museum/4959/poets1.html
http://users.erols.com/candidus/music.htm
http://www.ezlink.com/~culturev/CulturArt.htm
http://www.slip.net/~knabb/rexroth/index.htm
http://www.angelfire.com/mn2/anarchistpoetry/poets.html
Nigel
(Getting more than a little cynical about all this)
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