Personally, Bill, I am not able to separate a person's politics and their poetry. Of course, it is possible that both can be merely "recreational", and neither may spring from a very deep place. But in that case, I am not particularly interested in either anyway. If I do not pour enough of myself into my poetry for the general gist of my politics to be reflected, than I question my own personal poetic integrity. Likewise, if I do not invest enough of myself in my political views, than I am merely a tenuous knot of opinions, and not a human with a conscience.
I suppose politics can be more predominantly a matter of pragmatism, but surely the poetry should then, at the very least, reveal something about the particular poet's relationship to the nature of pragmatism itself.
I very much disavow the exclusively "literary" view that the poem is some sort of entity of its own, that its disassociation from the poet is something to be striven for, that it exists in a vacuum—whether that be a political one, a psychological one, or an aesthetic one. For me the "work" is indeed the thing; yet the "work" is not the product, but the process: the working. And that process goes on in the same place where other ways of interacting with the universe go on, including political ones. Thus I, personally, cannot separate a poem from the rest of a poet's being, nor do I think that I should strive for such a separation as a literary ideal. I crave a poetry that is expansive, inclusive, not one that shrinks and hardens to mere aestheticism.
Of course, I am not saying there there may not be vivid contradictions between poetic output and political expression, but those complexities merely beget closer scrutiny, rather than divorce one from the other. I will admit that I love Lovecraft, Celine, Heidegger (to name a few) all of whom have had cogent cases made against their political stances. It's not that I automatically reject the work of someone whose politics I am suspicious of: but I certainly reject the notion that such a connection does not exist or should be ignored. To say "I despise your politics, but I love your poetry without question" seems almost a form of literary nihilism to me.
Personally I seek to harmonize my political opinions and my poetic intuitions; and given that I have more of a talent for the latter, I insist that those poetic intuitions inform my politics as much as possible.
Nemo
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