Nitrous oxide and politics

I've been reading Kate Camp's manuscript and fuck has it what!

Direct injection overload!

And I wrote something today, that for the first time in ages was actually fun and seemed to have potential, but when I think about it (which I'm trying not to do) nothing has really changed. I had cereal and milk for breakfast instead of my usual toast, but how could that affect it? The writing is the same, the ideas are the same, the only difference being a bit of fuel additive in the tank. Nitrous oxide? Orange juice? Camp smoke?

Jay Parini in his essay The Politics of Poetry doesn't argue anything except that poets have always been political, most subvertly, some overtly and to ignore that in your own work (at least deliberately) is to risk becoming irrelevant.

What is politics? Putting yourself on the left or the right? The top or the bottom? Is it just caring about shit outside of your own small life? I'm not sure I've ever understood that. It seems there are people who are definitely political - join the party, have bumper stickers, signs on the front lawn - and then there are the people who focus on the small things - the unfairly imprisoned, the near-extinct bird - these people could be from any party and are likely to be from none, I guess they acknowledge what is right is never clear or simple. That is the kind of politics I like, but I don't like it being called politics which always seems to be about bigger overriding (broad stroked?) themes. Surely a poets' politics it's just the stuff of the world? Morality?

And on the topic of whether poetry ever made a difference, I don't think it has in the same way that a journalist never stopped a war. But poets can highlight things, explain things, use the politics of language as a tool. It doesn't change anything in the real world except highlight something that wasn't highlighted before. And that is one definition of a good poem I think.

History, language and influence

Wrote the third part to the Unsettlement/Settlement poem today. Thanks Chris for suggesting this and also giving me the 'Morning, Noon and Night' exercise, which I didn't do, but helped with the three-parter thing.

Watched Michael Palmer reading at Berkeley's Lunch Poems series. He mentioned a poem called 'So' (I think?) by Wallace Stevens that inspired a series of poems of his called 'So 1 (2,3,4...)' which piqued my interested because I think I am also influenced by Wallace Stevens, although I haven't read much of his stuff. The reason I say that because some of the things I have read of his just look and sound a little similar to mine, although I'm sure I've never read them before. So I'll try and find the 'So' series, it would be great to read a series of poems by someone who directly influences me on someone who indirectly influences me.

And on that note, I've just finished reading another Jay Parini essay on 'Tradition and Originality' which talks about borrowing/stealing from your precursor. This seems to have become accepted for writers to do in even the most obvious of ways since Eliot wrote The Wasteland and there doesn't seem to be much argument about this, not by writers at least. The most interesting thing he mentioned though, was how contemporary writing seems to inform how the canon is read (he cited an Eliot essay on this), so that by reinterpreting the past we are actually altering it. So if Michael Palmer was to write a poem that is influenced by a Wallace Steven's poem, then we would read the Wallace Steven's poem in a different way, perhaps contextually, perhaps just by giving it more significance. So it is a two way street, which is nice.

But he went on to compare this with the nature of language itself, how all words and stolen from the past and reinterpreted, recontextualised every time we use them and it is just that poets are conscious of this process and actively seek to give old words new meanings, old poems new life. I like that too.

Poetry is "about" the past, in that poets understand that language itself is history and that words have slipped through time, undergone mutations, shifts in meaning; but each word is a palimpest as well: it contains multiple erasures, which underlie its current meaning, coloring it, giving it character and ambiguity and direction. A poem, in this sense, is also a palimpest, a "writing over" of previous poems, and therefore a gift to the future, where it will be misread, misdirected, even misplaced.

Also, I like that small phrase "language itself is history." That might give me some help with my history series I think, which I really don't want to be about 'history' in the sense of this is what has happened in the past. Maybe etymology (and influence?) is the key. I started down that direction in one of the poems, although not very successfully. Maybe I could pick some interesting words that are 'normally' associated with history and look up the etymology, writing the poem from there? So it becomes the history of the word I guess.

Workshop come down

I have been slack on this.

Had my first full workshop yesterday. I was really interested to hear the different things people focussed on. I don't think there was anything too surprising there. The issues I was expecting kind of came up. Not that I know how to solve them or anything:

• Ambiguity/elusiveness. Still don't know what to do about this, in some ways I like the reader to bring their own experiences and wants to the poem, but I don't want that to completely fail, so I am reluctant to put in stuff that waves a flag saying 'this is what this poem is about', although the 'long' poem, Making nice things out of straw, which for me is just as elusive as the others seemed to be better received. Maybe this is to do with if you read something longer the meaning kind of soaks out of it a bit more. Rather than ending in a kind of abrupt way, leaving the reader hanging. Maybe long poems might be the answer. The other day someone was telling me how Amy Brown is doing her PhD in Melbourne and trying to create one epic poem in 3 years. Go the Cantos! But I don't think I want to go there. That seems a bit too much like a selfish challenge to me. The whole 'can I pull it off' thing, but a few that are 5 pages or so long would be nice I think. Concrete details are always good too I guess.
• Tics. Like the repetition of sentences twisted around or negated to achieve an effect. Damien mentioned that too and I think I've started to hold back on that a bit with my later stuff. Well at least I hope I have.

And there was heaps of useful editing things and suggestions for confusing sentences and words etc. So that will all make it's way in there. Overall it was a great workshop and incredibly valuable.

Lindsay lent me Why poetry matters, by Jay Parini (2008, Yale University Pr.) which I think I had read one of the essays before, but I'm not sure where. So I look forward to reading the whole book, if I haven't done already - my memory is atrocious. Other than that though I haven't read too much other stuff. Everything seemed to be on hold while I waited for this workshop thing (and Queens Birthday weekend too). But over the holidays, damn, try and stop me!