Don Share posted this on Squandermania but didn’t provide a link to the source. It’s from an extraordinary essay called “Shafts of Sunlight,” which Jeanette Winterson published in The Guardian:
[W]hen people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or 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.
The full essay is available on her Web site here. Enjoy!
damn computer puts things where it wants to ! and corrects spellin<br />g<br />& dis:regaurds spaciations <br /><br />I notice Irv Layton over on the right … a"breath of fresh air" !
I too like your comparison <br />is it called a simile ? or a metaphor ?<br />I forget I realize I shld use stayed in <br />university foR at least the last 45 + years<br />& invested my $$$4 in derivitives :<br /><br />I think that in this early-morning piece I<br />touched your "bases" or is that 'plinths" ?<br /><br />40<br />the news on the box non-stop
Joseph, I like your comparison of Perloff, et al., with the financial "managers" at Morgan Chase. Actually, "language" poetry and other such contraptions of the literary-academic-industrial complex do seem to have things in common with derivatives and credit default swaps and the various other monstrosities of the financial world in recent decades. In each case, the item in
We do have the choice, of course, of knuckling under to your forces of anti-humanism, as the editors of the Boston Review did recently when they published the latest effete blatherings of Marjorie Perloff. She extols the virtues of "appropriation," trotting out a trivial acrostic by John Cage and then writing about it with all the jargon-rich breathlessness for which she and her
Nevertheless, we keep trying — not necessarily because we have any optimism, or hope — (I do have these, sometimes, though it's a struggle to maintain) — but because we have no other choice.
Well said, Joseph<br /><br />Of course, to sensitive people the oppressive 'capitalist' regimes that monetize creative processes may be as onerous as if they'd lived under overtly oppressive regimes. Affluence is a type of tyranny in itself.<br /><br />My own fear is that Capital will become so 'globalized' that the distinctions you make (such as between 'deep' and &#
In <i>The Savage God</i> A. Alvarez talks about poets creating access to forces within them that can as easily prove destructive as healing. This is what we mean by having something "at stake." Poetry focused solely on the language surface is bound to be (surprise!) superficial, so the trick has become to deny that the forces Alvarez refers to matter at all, or even exist. Poetry
"I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy." I like where she's coming from…<br /><br />I suppose the unusually high ratio of poet to suicide is pretty obvious proof. I know the view of the tortured artist is probably dismissed as 'modernist' by the comfortable writing class academics who have nothing more to complain about than students who