Odds and Ends Essays, Blogs, Internet Discussions, Interviews and Miscellany

communicate more limited meanings. I say “others here”, but I mean those advocating an avant-garde poetic
language able to effect political change.
It seems to me obvious that to seriously intend one’s poetry to effect political change one has to make that poetry’s
“message”, “sentiments”, etc. capable of being communicated clearly to as wide a group of readers as you hope to
influence by it. So avant-garde poetry that claims to do this necessarily has to have more in common linguistically
with mainstream poetry than with avant-garde poetry that is more influenced by high modernism or early language
poetry.
That’s all I’m saying, really.
Sean Bonney
[Addressing Jeffrey Side’s reply to Ian Davidson] Jeffrey, an effective political poem doesn’t have to necessarily be a
‘manifesto’ or a ‘call to arms’. Poetry is far more complex than that: the question is more to try and work out
whatever it is that poetry can specifically contribute to political discourse, if that’s what it wants to do-I am not for
a second [saying] that poetry has to be an expression of a political stance, not at all, but some does, and it’s
something that poetry always has done, as more interesting elements of this thread have been talking about.
But in terms of political poetry, I’m interested in asking what it’s got, what it can do that other forms, philosophical,
rhetorical, propaganda can’t get to. Andrea’s ‘Wildfire’, for example, is a political essay on the history of the
chemical weapon white phosphorus, but as it’s a poem she’s able to bring in all sorts of connections, associations,
leaps etc. that would have been impossible in, say, a conventional history essay.
There’s a good line somewhere in Ed Dorn’s essays, where he says that he writes poetry because it [is] the quickest
way he can get to whatever it is he wants to say. Amiri Baraka (when he was still Leroi Jones) has a line that ‘Poetry
aims after difficult meanings. Meanings not already catered too’.
Oh and one more thing-isn’t [it] a bit vague to be talking about “political” poetry. Everything is political, even more
so now.
Jeffrey Side
Sean, I am not saying avant-garde poetry shouldn’t be political or that political poetry doesn’t exist. I’m only saying
that it can’t affect political change in the way, say, a riot can.
[The discussion ended at this point]
Jeffrey side
Discussion Two
There’s a follow up on Robert Archambeau’s blog to his post about British avant-garde political poetry:
‘Poetry and the Challenge to the Public Sphere’:
Quote:
As for the claim that the British experimental poetry associated with Cambridge has “challenged the
public sphere”-well, I’m not convinced it has, not if what we mean by the public sphere is anything
like what Habermas meant. Which is not to say anything more than that. To say this doesn’t imply that
poets should give up on poetry as the minimum condition for being political (Tom Paine, the heroic
challenger of the public sphere Plumb cites, wrote poetry-some people still read his poem “Liberty
Tree”). Nor does pointing out the over-grand nature of these particular claims imply that poetry should
submit to bureaucratic control (I’m not even sure what that would look like). Nor does it mean that
there’s no politics to poetry. But it does mean that the effects of British experimental poetry on the
90