Re: [acornlive] Link-a-dink...
chneena@tin.it (acornlive@dublinwriters.org)
Tue, 14 Nov 2000 10:28:32 +0100
Hi Imbas,
Thanks for the confusing, amusing, bemusing, abusing e-mail. To add to your
quoations, let's that that dumb one from W.S.Auden that 'Poetry makes
nothing happen'. Taken out of context you might presume he means what he
says. But in context (from In memory of W.B.Yeats) where he equates
Ireland's bid for independence and national sovereignty as 'madness' (Mad
ireland hurt you into poetry). The obvious meaning is that any nation that
would fight to free itself of English domination is 'mad'. he continues
."Now Ireland has its madness and its rain still/ poetry makes nothing
happen'. Poetry made a hell of a lot happen in Ireland: it certainly
contributed to a sense of nationhood that got the Colonial forces out. If
Auden thought poetry couldn't change climatic conditions, then he has right;
if he thought it could contribute to national independence then he was
wrong. These lines amount to a very silly statement wrapped in wonderful
sounds: unwrapping is important. He says later on something about the 'let
Irish vessel lie/emptied of its poetry'. Such arrogance! But with T.S.Eliot
at Faber & Faber guarding the garden of poetry with the flaming sword of
aristo-fascism (Americans who go Royalist/Anglican/English are such harmful
hybrids), Auden felt safe making his absurd claims. I am always amused by
1930s English poets sentimental commitment to Republican Spain and their
total indifference to the emerging Irish Free-State-Republic and England's
economic sanctions against it. McCourt had the chance in Angela's Ashes to
investigate the political and international roots of the poverty he so
exaggeratedly and superficially depicted, but he blew it. I think we need a
good study - DeValera's Ashes - to set the political/social/literary
picture of Ireland in the 1930s straight and to put Auden's Ireland into
context...(and McCourt's).
Regards,
Chris Neenan
> Chris and Nessa,
>
> I can relate...(Uusually my work is the piece that
> vanishes into hyperspace--not a pleasant feeling being
> the one whose "gone where no [one] has before"...)
>
> Glad to see the link's fixed--just wanted to let you
> know that "it ain't me babe,"--despite disturbing
> rumours that you may or may not have heard about
> myself in my "younger and more foolish" days, i.e.,
> college at Cal, Berkeley, when some friends of mine
> and I, upset at Victorianish dorm policies that
> segregated men and women by floor, managed to rewire
> (albeit briefly) the elevator's interior buttons so
> that the women's floors went to our's, #6, and ones
> like 8 went to 2...
>
> imbas
>
> P.S. I've tutored student-athletes at Cal in Creative
> Writing and found that each discipline has its
> corresponding "creative metaphors" one can summon in
> explaining language. I used a "circling wave" metaphor
> to explain "The Woman Warrior," Maxine Hong Kingston's
> "intuitive plotting" or deliberate dislocation of Time
> and Place ala a Shakespearean Romance to Southern
> California women on the Swim teams (blonde hair still
> smelling of pool chlorine, even!) and like, they
> "grokked" what I meant, dude...
>
> And though when I read in the papers that a woman
> questioned upon leaving the big hoopla over a "new Sam
> Shepard" play here in the Cal. Bay Area said that her
> interest flagged in the latter part, "because, I mean,
> like my firends and I all work for the Internet" [?!?
> Right out of this A.M.'s S.F. Chronicle], I find
> myself wondering, "what in the world do you think
> you're doing,pal?," comforting indeed are the thoughts
> of "remembrances past," i.e., Melville the lawyer's
> scrivner/customs flunky, Stevens the insurance
> salesman, Joyce the "exile, silence and cunning"
> Irishman rejected by his own, Shakespeare dying alone
> and forgotten while his Judas of a pal, state
> propagandist Ben Jonson (scribe for the big "Roman"
> coronation of King James I as the new "Augustus
> Caesar, King of Kings"), was rewarded for his "dirty
> work" with the biggest "Poet Laureate" style "V for
> Victory" Romanic "triumphes" England had ever been
> made to bear witness...
>
> Poets aren't a special species meant to be kept in a
> hothouse; insight comes from every "walk of life"...
>
> =====
>
> --"For, wondrous though the gift of knowledge is,
> it has little moving power over the happening..."
> Arthur Koestler, The Gladiators (Macmillan, 1939, 1965 Danube ed.,trans.
Edith
> Simon), p. 232
>
> --"...don't feel like Satan but to them I am...", Neil Young
>
> "Well, he could walk down the street and girls could not resist the stare,
and,
>
> unlike you, nobody ever called Pablo Picasso an asshole,"
> Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers
>
>
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