The Fact of a Doorframe - Adrienne Rich

from Foreword

"A poem may be written in the moment but it does its work in time. May be written in acute emotion yet drives toward precision, compression, the existential intentionality of art which is its way of discovering meaning. Made in and from the material of language, poetry is continually wrestling with its own medium.

...

To work in a medium which can be, has been, used as an instrument of trivialization and deceit, not to mention colonization and humiliation, is somewhat different from working in a medium like stone, clay, paint, charcoal, even iron or steel. A poet cannot refuse language, choose another medium. But the poet can re-fuse the language given to him or her, bend and torque it into an instrument for connection instead of dominance and apartheid ..."

Adrienne Rich 2002

The Fact of a Doorframe

W. W. Norton & Company
New York

James Fenton

From James Fenton 2002 An introduction to English poetry 
Penguin Books


p. 14
"You American poets, he said, and you European poets, you think that because you are poets you are very important, whereas I am an African, and I don't think I am important at all. When I go into a village and begin to tell a story, the first thing the audience will do is interrupt me. They will ask questions about the story I am telling, and if I do not work hard they will take over the story and tell it among themselves. I have to work hard to get the story back from them ...

We all assumed that, because we were poets, the audience would listen to us in appreciative silence. A hush would fall when we approached the rostrum, and when we sat down there would be applause. But to the African these seemed arrogant assumptions. To him, every scrap of attention and appreciation had to be worked for." 

http://www.jamesfenton.com/poetry/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/jamesfentonspoetrymasterclass

censorship

George Orwell wrote: "literary censorship ... is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without any need for an official ban." One means of silencing challenges to orthodoxy is that the press is in the hands of "wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics," and to silence unwelcome voices. A second device is a good education, which instills the "general tacit agreement that 'it wouldn't do' to mention that particular fact."
p.163

The project of keeping the public uninformed, passive, and obedient traces far back in history, but constantly takes new forms. That is particularly true when people win a degree of freedom, and cannot so easily be subdued by the threat or exercise of violence.
p. 179

In 1917 President Woodrow Wilson established the country's first official propaganda agency, called the Committe on Public Information ... its task was to turn a pacifist population into hysterical jingoists and enthusiasts for war ... These efforts had enormous success, including scandalous fabrications that were exposed long after they had done their work, and often persisted even after exposure ...
p. 179

Edward Bernays - one of the founders of the PR industry - "it was the astounding success of propaganda during the war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibility of regimenting the public mind."
p. 180

These mechanisms of regimentation of minds are "a new art in the practice of democracy". Walter Lippmann - most eminent figure of the century in American journalism.  
p. 180

The business world and the elite intellectuals were concerned with the same problem. "The bourgeoisie stood in fear of the common people," Bernays observed. As a result of "universal suffrage and universal schooling ... the masses promised to become king" - a dangerous tendency that could be controlled and reversed by new methods "to mold the mind of the masses" Bernays advised.
p.180

From "The Secular Priesthood and the Perils of Democracy"
in Noam Chomsky  2002 "On Nature and Language" edited by A Belletti & L Rizzi
UK Cambridge

Samuel Johnson

"The two most engaging powers of an author are, to make new things familiar and familiar things new."

Anthony Lawrence

On writing love poems: 
"you have to write around or to the side ... by weaving in and out of focus ... being associative ... in order to be able to see things very clearly you often have to deliberately take a back road"

from Poetica, RN 
http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2012/10/pca_20121020_1505.mp3 

http://www.griffith.edu.au/humanities-languages/school-humanities/staff/dr-anthony-lawrence 

Dennis O'Driscoll

"... all poetry is reaching for silence in some way ... deeply conscious of every word, paring it back all the time, cutting it back - why is it doing that? because it's trying to reach nearer to the silence ... how does it do that? ... it does that by having a music ... it's got to have some kind of music that is lifting you to somewhere else ..."

"T. S. Eliot more or less said ... if you write for one hour you are doing very well, but what do you do for the other twenty-three hours of the day? 
... you must have a grounding, there must be a context into which you write ..."

from live recording at Adelaide Writers' Week 2012

http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2012/10/pca_20121006_1505.mp3 


http://dennisodriscoll.com/ 

Poets Steve Evans and Mike Ladd on editing poetry

"Offer a positive comment first, then ask questions.

Why did you use this word here? Why is this line broken at this point? It’s going to provoke some thought, and it’s more tactful than delivering a report card. In the end, it is not whether the poem is deeply meaningful to the poet but whether it will work with a new reader who does not have that attachment. An editor has to respect the origins but steer comments back to the poem as a poem, not as a sentimental marker.

However, I have had too many students simply refuse to tamper with their divine words once uttered.

Usually, their feedback to others in a writing workshop shows a lack of depth and understanding, so there is some symmetry there. Lots of exposure to workshopping tends to cure that approach, but some people never get over it.

Maybe they don’t look for editors later in their writing life either, preferring to stick to their own counsel.

Part of me says that I will be shown up for the simple tradesman I really am - nothing inspired here, folks. Why would I want to show anyone the raw and clunky prototype stuff I have been bolting together in the shed at the bottom of the yard? Why draw attention to the clatter and the sparks of some crude and unfinished arc-welding, when eventually I could, instead, slide the sheet off a polished poem as if it were always such a complete design? On the other hand, some of that strange preliminary word work does seem magical to me too. Behind all the considerations and refinement of line breaks, sounds and the rest, is a part of the brain that works faster than I can follow. Yes, it may just be the body’s weird electricity, but I am often astounded at the beauty it can produce.

Magic? Sometimes it seems like it, and that’s a good feeling."

From
http://iped-editors.org/site/DefaultSite/filesystem/documents/EVANS%20LADD.pdf

Hafez

"The cries that Havez has made all of his life
Have not gone to waste; a strange story has emerged
Inside those cries, and a marvelous way of saying."

from 'A Thousand Doorkeepers'
The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door: Thirty Poems of Hafez
Translated by Rober Bly and Leonard Lewisohn
2008
Harper, NY


http://www.harpercollins.com/browseinside/index.aspx?isbn13=9780061138843 

These fragments have I shored against my ruin

T. S. Eliot  Murder in the Cathedral

This is one moment
But know that another
Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy. 

"I started to cry ...
So I took the book outside and read it all the way through, sitting on the steps in the usual northern gale.
... I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me.

So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, and that it shouldn't be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to say how it is.

It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place. " 

Jeanette Winterson 2011
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Jonathan Cape, London
p. 39

http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/ 

Diary of a Bad Year

"The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible."

J. M Coetzee
Diary of a Bad Year
2007 
Text Publishing, Melbourne
p. 22

David Rowbotham

"You know, when I was a young boy, I didn't know what to call what was inside of me . . . now I know it was poetry."

  "a rebellious boy in patched pants sitting in the apricot tree staring out at a world I could never enter in any other way than by scribbling poems and stories in my exercise book".

 Malouf, an old friend of Rowbotham, on reading two small volumes published in 2005 (The Brown Island and The Cave in the Sky) wrote to Rowbotham praising the work. "These poems seem to me to have a new transparency and ease, and nobility and quality of immediate memorability that really is the sort of achievement that only comes to a poet, if it comes at all, when he has freed himself of everything except what needs now to be said."

His daughter Jill, a journalist with The Australian, recalls that in has last years he was "virtually blind but wrote daily using giant print on an enormous computer screen". At 86, inside the frail frame, there was still that young boy trying to give utterance to a rich internal life that expressed itself in some of the finest Australian poems written. In the poem The Cave in the Sky Rowbotham wrote in a richly metaphoric way about dying: "If memory lives, then memory cares." And so he will be remembered.

 Poet David Rowbotham's late flowering crowned a life's work

• by: Phil Brown
• From: The Australian
• October 08, 2010   

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/poets-late-flowering-crowned-a-lifes-work/story-e6frg8n6-1225935637230 

The Gardener

I watched my father digging in his garden.

His spade, with a sound like the palm of a huge hand 

Against a huger tree, struck through the soil,

Lifted, turned, let fall. He pounded with care

Each stubborn clod and broke it into earth

That flowed between his fingers;

And the peewit came from the nest in the camphor-laurel

And, with a bird's simplicity, like a child's trust,

Stabbed for worms in the shadow of his knees.

You can not know the kindness of a man

Till you see him in a garden with a spade

And birds about his feet.

  

from Bungalow and Hurricane

published 1967 by Angus & Robertson, Sydney. 

'If you choose words carefully they resonate forever.'

Soprano Helen Noonan on the poetry of Emily Dickinson.
Helen Noonan has performed in the lieder opera Voicing Emily, The Life and Times of Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson's poetry helped her make sense of her own life and she says she was deeply affected in many dimensions. 

Noonan says, " She uses the same language as Shakespeare and Mozart. If you choose words carefully they resonate forever. That is why the arts are so potentially valuable because they can connect a society to infinity."

Spoken by Emily Dickinson

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.

From 'Poet's evocative words brought to life again as soprano performs an encore' by Robin Usher, published in The Age, Melbourne, 16 August 2012.

http://www.online-literature.com/dickinson/

Robyn Mathison

My hens give advice on poetry

The world is full of cruelty and beauty:
a full moon rising gold above the river,
star travel through the cold night sky,
frost on grass blade and chook claw,
leaves winking in wing-stretch morning sun.

Take your poems out into the garden,
think and speak them, try to hum them.
Pick some seed heads, dig some mulch in,
nip back a tendril of rampant creeper.
Stop and think your poems through again.

Your poems should strike the heart
with terror and with beauty.
As you settle down to write them
stop and ask yourself: Are they
fox-coloured? Do they sing? 

from the 2009 collection To Be Eaten By Mice
published by Ginninderra Press, Port Adelaide
http://www.ginninderrapress.com.au/

My hens give advice on poetry posted with permission of the poet: Robyn Mathison

Inquisitive Hens

 http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigbold/19794236/ 

Peter Boyle

from
museum of SPACE, 2004, University of Queensland Press, Qld.
p. 99

Of Poetry

Great poems are often extraordinarily simple.

They carry their openness

with both hands.

If there is a metaphor lounging in a doorway

they step briskly past.

The boom of generals

and presidents with their rhetoric manuals

will go on sowing the wind.

The great poems are distrustful of speech.

Quietly,

like someone very old

who has only a few hours left of human time,

they gaze into the faces around them -

one by one

they kiss love into our mouths. 

http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/boyle-peter 

http://cordite.org.au/reviews/bev-braune-reviews-peter-boyle/

Tony Harrison

From Permanently Bard
Edited by Carol Rutter
1995 
Bloodaxe Books, UK

p. 33

Heredity

How you became a poet's a mystery!
Wherever did you get your talent from?
I say: I had two uncles, Joe and Harry - 
one was a stammerer, the other dumb.

from Notes
p. 124

The poet Stephen Spender ... remarks that this little epigraph explains 'the accident of a poet's having been born into [a] working class family' by offering 'an ironic theory of psychological compensation.' Spender says he is tempted to regard Harrison almost as 'a changeling, not out of some other social class but perhaps out of Shakespearean romance, sneaked into a cradle in some house in a back street in Leeds by some royal parent (poetry being royal) anxious to disembarrass herself or himself of an unwanted offspring.'  ... his remarks are endearing, but they are also ironically revealling. By assuming that the poet rocked in a working-class cradle must be a changeling Spender nurses the notion that Harrison's poetry strangles the utterance, that 'Poetry's the speech of kings.' Uncle Joe and Uncle Harry ...keep returning ...  the stutterer and the mute are the influences who preside over Harrison's effort to turn 'mute ingloriousness' into poetry.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2012/jul/18/rediscovering-tony-harrison

Peter Daniel Steele, AM: priest, poet, academic

"Publishing a poem is like dropping a feather down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo."

from Obituaries, The Age,  3 July 2012

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/encounter/things-can-only-get-better/3583064

Charles Simic

from

Why I Still Write Poetry

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/may/15/why-i-still-write-poetry/

"When my mother was very old and in a nursing home, she surprised me one day toward the end of her life by asking me if I still wrote poetry. When I blurted out that I still do, she stared at me with incomprehension. I had to repeat what I said, till she sighed and shook her head, probably thinking to herself this son of mine has always been a little nuts."

"The mystery to me is that I continued writing poetry long after there was any need for that. My early poems were embarrassingly bad, and the ones that came right after, not much better. I have known in my life a number of young poets with immense talent who gave up poetry even after being told they were geniuses. No one ever made that mistake with me, and yet I kept going."

from 

Eternity's Orphans

Do you remember telling me,
'Everything outside this moment is a lie'?
We were undressing in the dark
Right at the water's edge
When I slipped the watch off my wrist
And without being seen or saying
Anything in reply, I threw it into the sea

http://cordite.org.au/reviews/ali-alizadeh-reviews-charles-simic/

http://eyelashroaming.wordpress.com/2012/05/27/i-love-my-leather-jacket/

Jay Parini

Jay Parini talking to Ramona Koval on Radio National Book Show

"... it was kind of transformative for me because I think I had grown a little cynical about poetry at times and had forgotten how important it is on the most gut-basic level how this language can really tighten our grip on experience and give us a kind of purchase on the world and help us to think about choices and things we do.

                                                 

... there's hardly a day of my life that some lines of poetry don't come into my head and kind of inform some aspect of my experience in that day  ...  without these concrete images we're walking around in a kind of nebulous world. I don't feel rooted unless I've been writing and reading poetry in the morning. For 40 years now, I get up in the morning ... go to a local cafe and I'd begin my day always ... by reading a poem."

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bookshow/jay-parini-on-why-poetry-matters/3195782

The Conversation

Bronwyn Lea writes about political poetry for The Conversation.
http://theconversation.edu.au/political-poetry-took-down-g-nter-grass-but-is-it-any-good-6514 

"In some societies – past and, sadly, some present – poets pay with their lives for the gall of social critique."

The Creating Brain: reaching Xanadu

Nancy Andreasen, professor of psychiatry at Iowa University talking with Lynne Malcolm, All In The Mind, Radio National, 21 May 2012.  Dr. Andreasen's most recent book The Creating Brain: the neuroscience of genius is published by Dana Press and distributed in Australia by Footprint Books.

"... creative people tend to be very curious about all kinds of things, they tend to be adventuresome, they tend to be a little bit iconoclastic, which is related to being original of course. Sometimes they just perceive things in a totally new and different way that other people are simply not able to see. I mean they see things that are true and real and that are obvious to them – that's especially true in science and math and they aren't obvious to other people. You know some of the creative scientists I know say over and over, isn't that obvious, isn't that obvious, it's just obvious, doesn't everybody know that, that's obvious.
They are sometimes a little prone to get into trouble because they are original and seem rebellious and especially you could get into trouble when you're a younger person. You may be unpopular with your teachers because you might seem like a know-it-all; you may be unpopular with your peers for the same reason. So some people who are creative have somewhat miserable childhoods. And I think it's one of the challenges of our society, of all societies, to figure out how to actually recognise and nurture these original kids rather than essentially sometimes punishing them for their originality.
Another characteristic is that they tend to be obsessional, not in a diseased way but they start to chew on a problem – and that might be writing a story, it might be a math problem, it might be a computer science problem, it might be creating a painting – and they get into it so deeply that they may end up working all night on what they're doing."

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/the-creating-brain---reaching-xanadu/4016828

 http://nancyandreasen.com/

Harold Bloom

 "Poetry essentially is figurative language, concentrated so that its form is both expressive and evocative. Figuration is a departure from the literal, and the form of a great poem itself can be a trope ("turning") or figure. A common dictionary equivalent for "figurative language is "metaphorical", but a metaphor actually is a highly specific figure, or turning from the literal."

Four fundamental tropes: irony, synecdoche, metonymy, metaphor.
Irony - commits those who use it to issues of presence and absence.
Synecdoche - "symbol" - figurative substitute of a part for a whole also suggest that incompletion in which something within the poem stands for something outside it.
Metonymy - contiguity replaces resemblance, since the name or prime aspect of anything is sufficient to indicate it, provided it is near in space to what serves as substitute.
Metaphor - transfers the ordinary association of one word to another.

"Figuration of tropes create meaning, which could not exist without them, and this making of meaning is largest in authentic poetry, where an excess or overflow emanates from figurative language, and brings about a condition of newness."

from The Best Poems of the English Language

 Harold Bloom reciting Wallace Stevens 'Tea at the Palaz of Hoon'

"The Anatomy of Influence": Six Questions for Harold Bloom

The Poetry of Politics: Australian Aboriginal Verse - Adam Shoemaker

For example, as Stanner has commented, the Black Australian sense of oneness with the soil – which is the essence of the land rights campaign – is a relationship which requires a poetic understanding:

No English words are good enough to give a sense of the links between an aboriginal group and its homeland. Our word ‘home’, warm and suggestive though it be, does not match the aboriginal word that may mean ‘camp’, ‘hearth’, ‘country’, ‘everlasting home’, ‘totem place’, ‘life source’, ‘spirit centre’ and much else all in one. Our word ‘land’ is too spare and meagre. We can now scarcely use it except with economic overtones unless we happen to be poets.^[364]

http://epress.anu.edu.au/bwwp/mobile_devices/ch08.html

Elizabeth Bishop at 100

Oodgeroo Noonuccal

Understand Old One

What if you came back now
To our new world, the city roaring
There on the old peaceful camping place
Of your red fires along the quiet water,
How you would wonder
At towering stone gunyas high in air
Immense, incredible;
Planes in the sky over, swarms of cars
Like things frantic in flight.

http://www.ict.griffith.edu.au/~davidt/redlandbay/oodgeroo.htm 

Adrienne Rich

Rich wrote, “You must read, and write, as if your life depended on it.”

The Will To Change

Adrienne Rich’s death leaves a hole in the culture that can’t easily be filled.

By Meghan O'Rourke

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/obit/2012/03/adrienne_rich_how_her_work_changed_american_poetry_.single.html

Writer's Block

writer's block (1)

A conversation with Anne Stevenson from The Silent Woman:

p. 107
"... Almost every writer I know has severe depressions."
"... It's when you know you are not fulfilling yourself, when you know you're letting yourself down. To be an artist you have to grant a certain authority to yourself. The critical world wants to deprive you of this authority."

Janet Malcolm 1994 Picador, Australia.

A life in writing: Janet Malcolm 

Anne Stevenson: poet

writer's block (2)

From The Silent Woman

p. 114
"Leafing through the Olwyn-Anne correspondence, I have the sense of being in the company of an old and all too familiar presence, and suddenly, in an intuitive flash, I know what it is. I recognize Olwyn as a personification of the force - sometimes called the resistance - that can keep the writer from writing. She is the voice that whispers in your ear and tells you to put down your pen before she knocks it out of your hand. In letter after letter she tells Anne the withering things that writers tell themselves as they try to write. Seen as a dialogue between the writer's inner voices - the one abusive and scornful, the other defensive and plaintive - the Olwyn-Anne correspondence becomes something more than the trace of a quarrel between two women who should never have worked together."

Janet Malcolm, 1994, Picador, Australia.

A life in writing: Janet Malcolm 

Anne Stevenson: poet


 

writer's block (3)

from The Silent Woman

p. 202
"... the house: a depository of bizarre clutter and disorder ... on every surface hundreds, perhaps thousands, of objects were piled, as if the place were a secondhand shop into which the contents of ten other seconhand shops had been hurriedly crammed, and over everything there was a film of dust: not ordinary transient dust but dust that itself was overlaid with dust - dust that through the years had acquired almost a kind of objecthood, a sort of immancence."
p. 204
Later... it appeared to me as a kind of monstrous allegory of truth. This is the way things are, the place says. This is unmediated actuality, in all its mutliplicity, randomness, inconsistency, redundancy, authenticity. Before the magisterial mess of Trevor Thomas's house, the orderly houses that most of us live in seem meagre and lifeless - as, in the same way, the narratives called biographies pale and shrink in the face of the disorderly actuality that is a life. The house also stirred my imagination as a metaphor for the problem of writing. Each person who sits down to write faces not a blank page but his own vastly overfilled mind ...
The goal is to make a space where a few ideas and images and feelings may be so arranged that a reader will want to linger awhile among them, rather than to flee, as I had wanted to flee from Thomas's house. But this task of housecleaning (of narrating) is not merely arduous; it is dangerous ... throwing the wrong things out and keeping the wrong things in ...  The fear that I felt in Thomas's house is a cousin of the fear felt by the writer who cannot risk beginning to write."

Janet Malcolm, 1994, Picador, Australia.

A life in writing: Janet Malcolm

Simon Caterson

"The finest poetry affects the parts of the mind that other forms of art simply don't reach, though I can't explain exactly how this happens. 'Genuine poetry,' argued T. S. Eliot, 'can communicate before it is understood.' I would describe the impact of poetry to being unexpectedly under the influence of an emotion, such as falling in love. And if we knew what love was, then it would cease to exist."
from In prose of poetry, The Age, 16 January 2005.

'Hoax Nation' by Simon Caterson

Second Chorus from Anouilh's Antigone

"In a tragedy, nothing is in doubt and everyone's destiny is known. That makes for tranquility. There is a sort of fellow-feeling among characters in a tragedy: he who kills is as innocent as he who gets killed: it's all a matter of what part you are playing. Tragedy is restful; and the reason is that hope, that foul deceitful thing, has no part in it. There isn't any hope. You're trapped. The whole sky has fallen on you, and all you can do about it is shout. Don't mistake me: I said 'shout': I did not say groan, whimper, complain. That, you cannot do. But you can shout aloud; you can get at all those things said that you never dared say--or never even knew till then. And you don't say these things because it will do any good to say them: you know better than that. You say them for their own sake; you say them because you learn a lot from them."

http://spaniardintheworks.blogspot.com.au/2007/03/2nd-chorus-from-jean-anouilhs-antigone.html

Anne Stevenson

"The scientist’s spirit of inquiry is not all that different from the poet’s. Keeping the biggest, most basic questions open and mysterious is what makes the disciplines of science and literature exciting in this spoiled, rich western world of the 21st century that can seem so cheap and media-heavy, filled with meaningless chatter."

'My Life in Poetry' by Anne Stevenson: feature written by Anne Stevenson in the May 2010 issue of ARTEMISPoetry.

www.secondlightlive.co.uk 

'The Silent Woman' by Janet Malcolm

p. 63

'Imaginative literature is produced under the pressure of an inner interrogation ... Poets and novelists and playwrights make themselves, against terrible resistances, give over what the rest of us keep safely locked within our hearts.' 

Picador, Australia, 1994.

A life in writing: Janet Malcolm 

Nick Mount on Sylvia Plath's Ariel

Pink Floyd “There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me.”

"It is easy to take credit after an idea strikes you, but in fact, neurons in your brain secretly perform an enormous amount of work before inspiration hits."

"a thing is brought forth which we didn't know we had in us,

so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out

and stood in the light, lashing his tail."

"our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.”

" poems should be written rarely and reluctantly,
under unbearable duress and only with the hope
that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument."

from Ars Poetica? Czeslaw Milosz

http://www.cstone.net/~poems/twopomil.htm

"a poem can be like a glass of water"

Cate Kennedy
" ... is writing poems going to be the most useful thing ...
   when the world needs clean water ... not more poems ....
   ... sometimes, it's worth remembering, a poem can be like a glass of water ..."

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/poetica/2012-03-24/3840784

politics of writing

from an interview with artist John Olsen

"The more a creative person enlarges their capacity, enlarges their vocabulary, the more they are able to challenge their own talent."

The masterly Mr Squiggle, by Janet Hawley, Good Weekend, 2 September 2006.
  

The Myth of Plato and Plato the Myth-maker

Rick Benitez: Look, I think that’s a really good question. Partly it does have to do with literature. Most people would know that Plato has a great antagonism to the poets of his day, the ones who went before him...
Alan Saunders: Yes, he wanted them garlanded and then dismissed from the city, didn’t he?
Rick Benitez: That’s right, but he didn’t want all of poetry dismissed. He wanted a particular kind of poetry, his philosophic poetry, to replace that, or anyone else who could write poetry in a philosophic way. So in the Phaedo he famously has Socrates say that philosophy is the greatest music, right, so he does think of philosophy as a kind of art form and he’s pioneering a new genre. He’s not the first to begin to write dialogues, but he’s one of the ones who takes it to its highest form as a genre. So in part he is doing something aesthetic, something like a novelist would do. In part he’s doing that, but I also think embedded in his purposes is the use of pictures, images. The Greek word is icons, representations, to lead people from one kind of perspective, one way of thinking about things, to another, and his myths have that kind of function which I think of as at least pedagogical and maybe more philosophical of shifting perspective to a new kind of perspective, a different one.
 ...   ...   ...   ...   ...   ...  
Alan Saunders: How did Plato regard the power of myth to control lives?
Rick Benitez: It’s a double-edged sword, it has incredible power to control lives, and I think you want to say not just the lives of people who are the irrational lot. It has the power to control the lives of even the most rational of people, and one of the things you find described in The Republic is that even the guardians of the republic, those most rational of all people in the society, are people for whom the power of the image is so great that it slips in under the radar of rationality and has its effect on them. This is one reason why he’s so scared of some kinds of poetry and its ability to persuade. He’s scared of propaganda. Many people may think, well, he’s got his own propaganda to replace it, but he doesn’t like the power that image has to persuade even the most rational of people. So, the most important thing for him is if you’re going to have the use of myths and images in society, he wants them to be ones that reflect in more accurate ways the truth of the matter about things, and this is where his belief that there is a truth of the matter about even the most ordinary practical sorts of things, right and wrong in everyday life, may differ from more recent views about that, more relativistic views about that.

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