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what we mean by oblique, and who and what we are applying the term to.
One problem here is the difference between avant-garde in the arts in general and avant-garde in poetry. The avantgarde
in other arts is very rarely experienced as being oblique, because of the particular nature of those arts, how
they function and are responded to etc. But poetry, the medium of words, functions in a different way and therefore
our experience of it, our reception, mostly operates in an area of complexity/difficulty. This is why I think there is
some truth in your notion of the oblique-but I think you are coming to it from the wrong direction. For me it is
“oblique” (if it is) because it is language. And with “poetry” this is language separated from the usual jobs it performs
in everyday conversation, in stories and novels, on the news and in blogs etc.
Traditional poems and songs of all sorts, from all around the world, could be seen as oblique when measured against
the usefulness of other types of language use, but we don’t have a problem with them do we? Why not? It is not that
we understand them intellectually (we probably don’t), it’s because we understand them emotionally-we bring an
openness to them, a good will, a desire etc. They work on us. (I happen to think this is a lot to do with the
unconscious but I am not sure if that is relevant here.) However, there is a certain type of late C20 poetry which, for
many and various reasons, fails to work in that way on certain people-the channels that are normally open appear
to be closed up. But if the channels were really closed up from the side of the poet (I’m not saying this doesn’t ever
happen because it certainly does, but it is a lot more rare than we think) then it would mean that nobody responded
to the work-but this is not the case, obviously. So the bulk of the closing-up must be happening on the reception
side. Therefore there is something happening in the work that elicits this failure-but is it obliquity? My answer is no,
not as such.
Conversely we have a type of poetry, again it is one that has mostly come to us in late C20 English speaking countries,
which seems to deliberately avoid such problems, by being written for wide gaping channels that it knows are open
and ready for it. This, in my opinion, is the only way in which a straight case could be made for the difference
between mainstream and avant-garde (what the hell do we mean by that anyway, these days?) being down to
obliquity and transparency. For me it is too straight a case-the line disappears into the distance.
Jeffrey Side
[Addressing Ian Davidson’s comment] But are the poems you mention, Ian, effecting political change? The obvious
answer is that they are not. This is the point Robert Archambeau is making in the blog post that inspired this thread.
You say that the best political poetry ‘doesn’t try to persuade me of anything’, this may be true of the best, but it
doesn’t address the question Archambeau is making regarding the claims that Cambridge Poetry is effecting political
change.
The hesitancy you note in Prynne’s Refuse Collection suggests that he is, perhaps, aware that such poetry is best read
philosophically rather than as manifestos or a call to arms.
Tim Allen
Let’s take Prynne as an example (and only as an example, not because I think he does it better than anyone else-for
me he is one of many). Prynne’s poetry is not “political” in the sense that Adrian Mitchell’s was, not because it isn’t
agitprop but because it is a poetry that exists the way it does because of the political. I think we can say this about
many of the poets we associate with the British avant-garde, but particularly Cambridge. It was very much a political
turn that propelled Prynne AWAY from a political poetry in the normally accepted sense. The irony is that this
makes it even more political, while not being a political poetry. Hope that makes sense.
Jeffrey side
Tim, I take on board what you say. My basic point is that although poetic language (both mainstream and avantgarde)
allows for certain amounts of obliqueness, opaqueness, ambiguity etc. It is avant-garde poetry that has
usually made more of these aspects than mainstream poetry (at least mainstream poetry since The Movement).
How this relates to political poetry depends on how one views the use of language in avant-garde poetry. I view it as
being, ideally, opaque (resistant to any one meaning), others here perhaps view it, more or less, as able to
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