I also loved that piece with the water and the fire and the breathing, sinking and rising body (that was installed at the Saltpetrière in Paris).

And thanks for sending me to David & Alli’s wonderful exchange!

Thank you so much for mentioning Bill Viola. I did not know about that documentary. I still consider I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like to be one of the most powerful works of our time, in any medium.

Jonathan

But I was very grateful to find the links in this terse, kind and open-handed post of yours, Norma. Thanks a million. I had no idea there was so much revelatory Bill Viola on line, nor that I could read an actual letter from David Brazil to someone other than myself on line (no, I don’t think there are any letters to me on line, that’s not what I meant . . . ). Linkages proliferate thickages. Anyway, gotta watch this morning’s Democracy Now before it’s tomorrow, and get to bed.

Take Neruda, who was highly influenced by ST. John. His poems are gorgeous, sensual, full of love. But he let’s his poetry still be beautiful. Here is a poet who was exiled from his country, who was basically toe-to-toe with dictators yet where is his poetry OVERTLY political? where does it place politics over artistry? Nowhere that I am aware. He doesn’t need to tell himself, as Alli and David seem to have to, that it is political. They wouldn’t need to tell themselves this if something about their wasn’t political enough? They’d already know.

Manny Cartola

I love poetry. I love poets. I love reading poetry, talking about it, analyzing it, or not analyzing it and enjoying it.

I do not, or did not, or did not intend to create a dichotomy between poets and activists.

My point is simple, and directed towards certain cliques that make it their practice to politicize their poetry, rather than actually getting involved in politics in a more direct mode. People who think taking a dump about themselves in free-verse at a local coffee shop is as effective as, say, getting involved with an activist organization are sorely misguided. There is a difference between saying and doing… in spite of J.L. Austin and all that. You, dear reader, and I both know it, no matter how much theorizing about poetry we may do to justify our being lazy and our fear of actually joining people “in the field of action” rather than in the bourgeois daycares of our creative writing departments.

Chris Cobb: Please re-read what I said. I did say poetry is a political act. Even not writing poetry, even and especially inaction is an act that is ethico-political. Please re-read and you’ll find I am in agreeance with you. Yet imagine if they really did run for senate? Say like Al Franken who was an artists that originally used politically-infused satire? There is an example for you. Perhaps he felt his comedy wasn’t enough and sought more direct means… or no?

Brent Cunningham: Why so perturbed? Listen carefully: I didn’t make an activist-versus-poet divide, you did. I was talking specifically of the obvious inneffectiveness of specific types of “hyper-politicized” poetry (and neo-avant gardist art in general, for that matter), specifically the anti-aesthetic strains of identity-poetry and art. Art and poetry that is too much a “statement” and too little craft, too little artistry, too little Art. Poetry that is too much about the theory that informs and ends up being inneffectual. Those artists who politicize their art so as to cover up lack of craft. Take Neruda for instance. A beliver that poetry should be right in there, read aloud to the proletariat and to revolutionaries. He himself often got right out and read his poems! Take that for instance! Now, compare that to this modish, cliquish, academic poetry of our time which has alot to say about idenity and politics, a lot to say about how everything is “political” yet uses this very statement as an excuse, insisting that their insular academic culture is in fact a political act. You miss my point entirely! I’m saying that it isn’t, firstly poetic enough, and secondly it isn’t political enough! It isn’t active enough! When one acknowledges that writing a poem is a political act then why not intesify that act? Why must it be ONLY about the identity politics they learned in their bourgeois English departments? Why can’t they, with all the more freedom than San Juan de la Cruz, to go out in the world’s injustice, and make their poetry a truly political act? Simply because the poetry of our time is either bourgeois baby-boomers collecting tenure or it is SF or NY tweenies who are too comfortable with their degrees to engage with oppressed people and use their talents as writers and artists to engage! What I am saying, if you get the gist, is that it is all good and swell to just say “everything is political action” but this we already know.

But I would like to ask the poster why she chose the title “Palimpsest”. Superficially, it seems like a formal word — reflecting a preoccupation with the text and its physicality, rather than with the message. Would an activist care whether the manifesto was written on a fresh sheet, or one from which an earlier manifesto had been erased, or just scrawled over the old manifesto with a bigger marker?

(I was also going to ask why such a normal definition of “palimpsest” (Googling, I see it verbatim in a dictionary of 1860) was credited to HD. But there’s at least a formalist answer to this — HD was copying out the old words on fresh paper, as a palimpsest is the inscription of fresh words over old.)