# war poetry - an oxymoron?



## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

Bit of a beef of mine this - I mean ok there's a certain effect when the forms of romantic poetry collide with the inutterably terribe reality of war.  But the result is still an effort to maintain the lyrical coherence of the individual subject.

I'd say the best "war poetry" is not by Wilfred Owen et al but by Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara.


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## Santino (Nov 11, 2011)

Not at all, you idiot.


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## Athos (Nov 11, 2011)

Maintaining the coherence of the first post would be a start!  Say what?


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## Pickman's model (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> Bit of a beef of mine this - I mean ok there's a certain effect when the forms of romantic poetry collide with the inutterably terribe reality of war. But the result is still an effort to maintain the lyrical coherence of the individual subject.
> 
> I'd say the best "war poetry" is not by Wilfred Owen et al but by Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara.


i've always thought that homer wrote the best war poem but there you go.


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## DotCommunist (Nov 11, 2011)

he did go on a bit though


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## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

Pickman's model said:


> i've always thought that homer wrote the best war poem but there you go.


OK the best war poetry of the modern age then


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## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

Santino said:


> Not at all, you idiot.


tell me where I'm wrong then


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## Santino (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> tell me where I'm wrong then


Start by posting a coherent, complete argument.


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## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

Athos said:


> Maintaining the coherence of the first post would be a start! Say what?



even in protesting the war at the level of content, in terms of form it (ie. war poetry as traditionally conceived) maintains the emphasis on the individual subject of lyric poetry without problematising that bourgeois narrative, which is ultimately part and parcel of the system that produced the war in the first place. I contend


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## Santino (Nov 11, 2011)

So not an oxymoron at all then.


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## Athos (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> maintains the emphasis on the individual subject of lyric poetry without problematising that bourgeois narrative



Meaning?


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## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

yes it is, the only 'poetry' adequate to the catastrophe that is war under advanced capitalism is 'anti-poetry' - writing which undermines the coherence and separation of "poetry" as such and the picture of the isolated individual lyric subject it grounds itself on.


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## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

Athos said:


> Meaning?



Meaning the view that poetry is a mirror into the soul, the true authentic individual selfhood of the poet and a picture of the world as it reveals itself uniquely to them.  Language is only social as as a secondary exchange between atomised individuals.


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## Belushi (Nov 11, 2011)

Is selfhood even a word?


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## Athos (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> Meaning the view that poetry is a mirror into the soul, the true authentic individual selfhood of the poet and a picture of the world as it reveals itself uniquely to them. Language is only social as as a secondary exchange between atomised individuals.


So all poetry is essentially bourgeois, then?


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## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

google it - yes it is.  But subjectivity is a better term.


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## Athos (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> google it - yes it is. But subjectivity is a better term.


Are you Karl Shapiro?


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## Santino (Nov 11, 2011)

There was poetry before there was a bourgeoisie.


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## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

Athos said:


> So all poetry is essentially bourgeois, then?



Not in an automatically negative sense.  When the bourgeoisie was in its revolutionary phase, then romantic poetry (Blake, early Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron etc.) was expressing something enormously valuable and politically positive.

But asserting the primacy of bourgeois individualism in an era where it is counter-revolutionary and leading to global war, holocaust, potential nuclear apocalypse is another thing altogether.   Just as true philosophy must inevitably be to a significant extent anti-philosophy, so with poetry.


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## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

Santino said:


> There was poetry before there was a bourgeoisie.



There wasn't lyric poetry in the sense we know it.


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## Athos (Nov 11, 2011)

Athos said:


> Are you Karl Shapiro?


 Or Karl Marx?


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## Santino (Nov 11, 2011)

So, not an oxymoron at all then.


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## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

yes, see #12


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## Athos (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> Not in an automatically negative sense. When the bourgeoisie was in its revolutionary phase, then romantic poetry (Blake, early Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron etc.) was expressing something enormously valuable and politically positive.
> 
> But asserting the primacy of bourgeois individualism in an era where it is counter-revolutionary and leading to global war, holocaust, potential nuclear apocalypse is another thing altogether. Just as true philosophy must inevitably be to a significant extent anti-philosophy, so with poetry.



That presupposes that individualism is necessarily bourgeois.


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## Santino (Nov 11, 2011)

Mods, can the title of this thread be changed to 'War Poetry - a style of poetry (assuming that we refer to a particularly rigid understanding of poetry at one historical juncture) that contains an internal conflict with regard to the socio-economic system that gave birth to it and also gave rise to a peculiarly modern form of total warfare'? Thanks.


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## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> Bit of a beef of mine this - I mean ok there's a certain effect when the forms of romantic poetry collide with the inutterably terribe reality of war.  But the result is still an effort to maintain the lyrical coherence of the individual subject.
> 
> I'd say the best "war poetry" is not by Wilfred Owen et al but by Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara.


 I remember your last/first poetry thread. Have you wheeled out truffaut yet?


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## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

Athos said:


> That presupposes that individualism is necessarily bourgeois.



Individualism is necessarily bourgeois.  Which isn't to say there was no such thing as individuation before them!


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## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> I remember your last/first poetry thread. Have you wheeled out truffaut yet?


truffaut?!


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## Athos (Nov 11, 2011)

I'm still trying to work out if you're serious, or just having a laugh?


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## JimW (Nov 11, 2011)

Scotsmen do good war poetry: Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica by Hamish Henderson no gods and precious few heroes
http://www.theskinny.co.uk/books/reviews/44838-elegies_for_dead_in_cyrenaica

Sorley MacLean also has a good one from the North Africa campaign about actually feeling the battle joy kick-in, as despite the horrors of war, fuck it, I'm a MacLean and I'm here to kill Nazis. He was no bourgeois. Can't find that one online but there's this from Cry of Europe:


> Would beauty and serene music put
> from me the sore frailty of this lasting cause,
> the Spanish miner leaping in the face of horror
> and his great spirit going down untroubled?
> ...


http://www.sorleymaclean.org/english/


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## Santino (Nov 11, 2011)

Tiny giant - that's an oxymoron.

Cold fire - there's another.


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## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

yes - and war poetry (in the modern age) belongs in that category


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## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

JimW said:


> He was no bourgeois.



I'm not saying only bourgeois write poetry.  I'm saying that the traditional forms and conceptions of poetry which we inherit are loaded with bourgeois assumptions.


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## Maggot (Nov 11, 2011)

Is Pseuds Corner still going?


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## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

Athos said:


> I'm still trying to work out if you're serious, or just having a laugh?


 Laughing in the face of po-faced hand-wringing poetic conceitedness


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## Santino (Nov 11, 2011)

You who rush to escape the common fate, 
stricken soldier from the Etruscan ramparts, 
why turn your angry eyes where I lie groaning?
I’m one of your closest comrades in arms. 
Save yourself then, so your parents might rejoice, 
don’t let my sister know of these things by your tears: 
how Gallus broke through the midst of Caesar’s swordsmen,
but failed to escape some unknown hand: 
and whatever bones she finds strewn on Etruscan hills,
let her never know them for mine.


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## Athos (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> Laughing in the face of po-faced hand-wringing poetic conceitedness


And with that, my question is answered.


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## JimW (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> I'm not saying only bourgeois write poetry. I'm saying that the traditional forms and conceptions of poetry which we inherit are loaded with bourgeois assumptions.


But then you have MacLean growing up a Gaelic speaker in an oral tradition, trying English verse at university, not liking it and going back to Gaelic then writing reams of agonising about being caught between love and family duty and wanting to volunteer in Spain, then a whole cycle in an older pre-bourgeois form used t praise feudal lords now turned into an elegy from the breaking of the Highland peasantry and Gaeldom in the Clearances. It's not just the bourgeois who struggle with individual versus larger things or like well-strung together words surely?


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## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

Santino said:


> You who rush to escape the common fate,
> stricken soldier from the Etruscan ramparts,
> why turn your angry eyes where I lie groaning?
> I’m one of your closest comrades in arms.
> ...



pre-modern. So what?


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## weepiper (Nov 11, 2011)

JimW said:


> Scotsmen do good war poetry





There's a translation onscreen. And this was composed orally in the trenches and only written down forty years afterwards because he'd never been taught to read or write in Gaelic. Not very bourgeois


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## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

JimW said:


> But then you have MacLean growing up a Gaelic speaker in an oral tradition, trying English verse at university, not liking it and going back to Gaelic then writing reams of agonising about being caught between love and family duty and wanting to volunteer in Spain, then a whole cycle in an older pre-bourgeois form used t praise feudal lords now turned into an elegy from the breaking of the Highland peasantry and Gaeldom in the Clearances. It's not just the bourgeois who struggle with individual versus larger things or like well-strung together words surely?



But once the genie of modernity is out of the bottle, then older forms don't mean what they used to mean - they are just styles you can choose or otherwise.  People if feudal societies weren't responsible for the fashioning of their own identities in the same sense that the bourgeois believes.


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## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

This is very clearly a war 'poem' precisely to the extent that it rejects 'poetry'


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## JimW (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> But once the genie of modernity is out of the bottle, then older forms don't mean what they used to mean - they are just styles you can choose or otherwise. People if feudal societies weren't responsible for the fashioning of their own identities in the same sense that the bourgeois believes.


Even some Welsh farmer up a hill preparing for the Eisteddfod? I get that there's this bourgeois figure of 'the poet', but a lot of art forms are tied up first to serving elites (church painting etc.) but then are put to other uses and re-made in the process.


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## Athos (Nov 11, 2011)

War!  What is it good for?  Absolutely nothing!


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## JimW (Nov 11, 2011)

Come again?


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## Santino (Nov 11, 2011)

Athos said:


> War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!


You missed out a 'Huh!'


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## Fedayn (Nov 11, 2011)

Belushi said:


> Is selfhood even a word?



Yes, it's where Will tells his 'homies' he lives.


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## Santino (Nov 11, 2011)

A poem that rejects poetry. This is the sort of fashionable nonsense that leads to supporting AV.


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## Athos (Nov 11, 2011)

JimW said:


> Come again?


Edwin Collins, innit?

And I'll tell you what war is good for, Edwin: it's the only way Americans learn geography.


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## JimW (Nov 11, 2011)

Fedayn said:


> Yes, it's where Will tells his 'homies' he lives.


We need a 'groan' button


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## JimW (Nov 11, 2011)

Athos said:


> Edwin Collins, innit?
> 
> And I'll tell you what war is good for, Edwin: it's the only way Americans learn geography.


I know, that was me doing 'say it again'. Too oblique.


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## Fedayn (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> truffaut?!



Yeah, French bloke, fairly famous film director from the 'Nouvelle Vague'.


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## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

JimW said:


> Even some Welsh farmer up a hill preparing for the Eisteddfod?



Well if they're doing that today, they are presumably doing it rather than packing up sheep farming and retraining for a job in IT or something!



> I get that there's this bourgeois figure of 'the poet', but a lot of art forms are tied up first to serving elites (church painting etc.) but then are put to other uses and re-made in the process.


Yes, but re-made in historical conditions that are foreign to their original purpose and meaning.  I guess it all goes back down to the separation of mental and physical labour, and the specialism inherent in class society.  The genius and inventiveness of "the poet" is a mystification stopping us seeing the genius of the collective.


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## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

Fedayn said:


> Yeah, French bloke, fairly famous film director from the 'Nouvelle Vague'.


I know who Truffaut is thanks Fed.  But why would I bring him into this discussion?  I don't remember referring to Truffaut before on here, still less on a poetry thread.


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## Santino (Nov 11, 2011)

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.


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## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

Santino said:


> I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
> I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
> Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
> I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.





> "The writers of these poems were invariably officers of exceptional courage and capacity, one a man constantly selected for dangerous work, all, I think, had the Military Cross; their letters are vivid and humorous, they were not without joy-- for all skill is joyful-- but felt bound, in the words of the best known, to plead the suffering of their men. In poems that had for a time considerable fame, written in the first person, they made that suffering their own. I have rejected these poems for the same reason that made Arnold withdraw his "Empedocles on Etna" from circulation; passive suffering is not a theme for poetry."


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## JimW (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> Yes, but re-made in historical conditions that are foreign to their original purpose and meaning. I guess it all goes back down to the separation of mental and physical labour, and the specialism inherent in class society. The genius and inventiveness of "the poet" is a mystification stopping us seeing the genius of the collective.



But also re-made by working class people for working class purposes, is me point. Maybe less troublesome in those Celtic nations where the figure of the poet never quite got pushed up to the same bourgeois heights; remember seeing some doc about the archaeology of Troy and to make a point about the accurate transmission of oral poetry, they show Turkish blokes in a cafe doing the Rumi epic and some fisherman off the Aran islands doing something nearly as long in Gaelic. It can be part of something popular too and come into the modern by non-bourgeois routes or be taken back from them, I think. Even that Welsh farmer-poet type I mentioned shows that people don't necessarily make the mental-manual split, or see it as inevitable. Bit like the folk who write doggerel to the letters page of the local paper.


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## JimW (Nov 11, 2011)

Sorley was just a common soldier in the tanks:


> *Heroes*
> 
> I did not see Lannes at Ratisbon
> nor MacLennan at Auldearn
> ...


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## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

OK maybe it is more complicated for those on the margins - or even the majority who haven't been brought up in with the classical Western canon.   It's interesting that poetry has a real live political presence in Egypt, say, or Palestine.  But here it's mostly exhausted, at least as something that actively intervenes in the public sphere.  Something like that is more likely to come from the margins of hip-hop or grime than "Poetry Review".


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## Santino (Nov 11, 2011)

I think it's more that you're a try-hard twat desperate to stir up some controversy on a message board, peddling adolescent nonsense you don't even understand. HTH.


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## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

JimW said:


> Sorley was just a common soldier in the tanks:



That is a slightly different case, there's an obvious irony at work there


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## Lea (Nov 11, 2011)

I've always found the following poem rather poignant:

*Le Dormeur du Val*
C'est un trou de verdure où chante une rivière
Accrochant follement aux herbes des haillons
D'argent; où le soleil de la montagne fière,
Luit; C'est un petit val qui mousse de rayons.
Un soldat jeune bouche ouverte, tête nue,
Et la nuque baignant dans le frais cresson bleu,
Dort; il est étendu dans l'herbe, sous la nue,
Pale dans son lit vert où la lumière pleut.
Les pieds dans les glaïeuls, il dort. Souriant comme
Sourirait un enfant malade, il fait un somme:
Nature, berce-le chaudement: il a froid.
Les parfums ne font plus frissonner sa narine;
Il dort dans le soleil, la main sur sa poitrine
Tranquille. Il a deux trous rouges au coté droit.
_*Arthur Rimbaud*_


_*The Sleeper in The Valley*_
It is a green hollow where a stream gurgles,
Crazily catching silver rags of itself on the grasses;
Where the sun shines from the proud mountain:
It is a little valley bubbling over with light.
A young soldier, open-mouthed, bare-headed,
With the nape of his neck bathed in cool blue cresses,
Sleeps; he is stretched out on the grass, under the sky,
Pale on his green bed where the light falls like rain.
His feet in the yellow flags, he lies sleeping. Smiling as
A sick child might smile, he is having a nap:
Cradle him warmly, Nature: he is cold.
No odour makes his nostrils quiver;
He sleeps in the sun, his hand on his breast
At peace. There are two red holes in his right side.


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## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

Santino said:


> I think


Do you? Precious little evidence of it on these boards.


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## JimW (Nov 11, 2011)

I'm just going to keep spamming the thread with Sorley, this one shows him putting the social and personal in:


> GOING  WESTWARDS
> 
> I go westwards in the Desert
> with my shame on my shoulders,
> ...


Found it here, http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=397301&section=2.3.4 which has a bit on his politics too: http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=397301&section=2.3.1


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## JimW (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> That is a slightly different case, there's an obvious irony at work there


But he's doing something with the heroic tradition of the battle poem in Gaelic tradition, not some Oxbridge clever-clever


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## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> I remember your last/first poetry thread. Have you wheeled out truffaut yet?



I thought the last poetry thread i had on here was where you were claiming that Wilfred Owen was working class because his dad worked on the railways.  But then I found out he was managing director of a rail company or something?


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## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> I thought the last poetry thread i had on here was where you were claiming that Wilfred Owen was working class because his dad worked on the railways.  But then I found out he was managing director of a rail company or something?


Please do post a link to that great thread.


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## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

What are you banging on about with Truffaut anyway?


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## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> What are you banging on about with Truffaut anyway?


No link then? 

Truffaut argued that it is impossible to make an anti- war film. The seemingly contradictory nature of such claim and it's surface similarity to your op made me suspect that you'd been reading him.


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## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

http://www.urban75.net/forums/threads/wilfred-owen-crap-or-not-crap.53034/

A very old thread - six years ago - when I was in an even more pretentious and self-opinionated mood than today  Must be time of the month/year. I don't hold to everything I said there (partly just being provocative!) but some interesting observations nevertheless:



> certain subjects * are * less likely to be appropriate subjects for poetry.
> 
> can you imagine a Lib Dem conference being the occasion for a radical breakthrough in verse form?



In 2005 - little did we know..!


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## kabbes (Nov 11, 2011)

Santino said:


> Start by posting a coherent, complete argument.



Ooh, Goedel is turning in his box.


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## spring-peeper (Nov 11, 2011)

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
      Between the crosses, row on row,
   That mark our place; and in the sky
   The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
   Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
         In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
   The torch; be yours to hold it high.
   If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
         In Flanders fields.


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## likesfish (Nov 11, 2011)

people don't much like the 3rd verse these days.
 Its not peace studies we need its war studies peace is simply the absence of war.
  If more MPS and for example Blair found himself having to lead the troops into battle we might have a few fewer wars. No Guarantee though  Winston and Maggie would certainly been have been up for it


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## weepiper (Nov 11, 2011)

*Last Post by Carol Ann Duffy*


In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin
that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud ...
but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood
run upwards from the slime into its wounds;
see lines and lines of British boys rewind
back to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home -
mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers
not entering the story now
to die and die and die.
Dulce - No - Decorum - No - Pro patria mori.
You walk away.
You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)
like all your mates do too -
Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert -
and light a cigarette.
There's coffee in the square,
warm French bread
and all those thousands dead
are shaking dried mud from their hair
and queuing up for home. Freshly alive,
a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, released
from History; the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.
You lean against a wall,
your several million lives still possible
and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.
You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.
If poetry could truly tell it backwards,
then it would.


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## Orang Utan (Nov 11, 2011)

never has a thread title enraged me so much. cunt off, OP


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## Orang Utan (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> yes it is, the only 'poetry' adequate to the catastrophe that is war under advanced capitalism is 'anti-poetry' - writing which undermines the coherence and separation of "poetry" as such and the picture of the isolated individual lyric subject it grounds itself on.


says who?


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## Orang Utan (Nov 11, 2011)

i think wilfred owen is a fantastic war poet. what right does artucl8 have to claim it isn't valid war poetry?


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## Orang Utan (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> I thought the last poetry thread i had on here was where you were claiming that Wilfred Owen was working class because his dad worked on the railways. But then I found out he was managing director of a rail company or something?


what does that matter?


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## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2011)

Orang Utan said:


> says who?


click on the link to an old thread when you get to the last page. That will cheer you up.


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## Orang Utan (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> OK maybe it is more complicated for those on the margins - or even the majority who haven't been brought up in with the classical Western canon. It's interesting that poetry has a real live political presence in Egypt, say, or Palestine. But here it's mostly exhausted, at least as something that actively intervenes in the public sphere. Something like that is more likely to come from the margins of hip-hop or grime than "Poetry Review".


says who?


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## FiFi (Nov 11, 2011)

If poetry is a an attempt to articulate complex emotions and feelings, then writing poems about War and it's effects is far from an oxymoron.
Some of the most powerful and effecting images in poetry have been written by those affected by the events of war.


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## Orang Utan (Nov 11, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> click on the link to an old thread when you get to the last page. That will cheer you up.


 i've just read the first page of that. i'm not sure i can stomach any more of it


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## Orang Utan (Nov 11, 2011)

FiFi said:


> If poetry is a an attempt to articulate complex emotions and feelings, then writing poems about War and it's effects is far from an oxymoron.
> Some of the most powerful and effecting images in poetry have been written by those affected by the events of war.


i think inarticul8 is saying poetry is something else and is only valid as poetry if it meets certain political criteria. what rot. are haikus not poetry then articul8?


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## Santino (Nov 11, 2011)

Just learned that Shakespeare was inadequately committed to permanent workers' revolution.


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## jesuscrept (Nov 11, 2011)

Why is it an oxymoron?


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## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

Orang Utan said:


> i think inarticul8 is saying poetry is something else and is only valid as poetry if it meets certain political criteria. what rot.



No, on the contrary - I am arguing that poetry needs to meet _aesthetic_ criteria no longer historically possible for lyric poetry, that war "poetry" needs to totally reinvent itself if not to be false to the experience it would claim to invoke.  This is not an especially radical or novel claim - as Adorno famously wrote:


> *to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, and that corrodes also the knowledge which expresses why it has become impossible to write poetry today. *




*Should we mourn the sacrifice of the likes of Owen?  Yes, of course.  Are his poems of interest in exposing the contradictions between inherited literary form and the reality of his experience?  In a way, yes.  Is this enough to make him "a great poet"?  I'm saying that the question is itself the wrong question.  *

*What we should be asking is why - in an era where it is possible for masses of ordinary people to create poetry at the level of everyday social experience - are we instead left debating whose depiction of sacrifice is better sufficiently better than others to enter the narrow literary pantheon of the "individual genius".  
*


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## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> No, on the contrary - I am arguing that poetry needs to meet _aesthetic_ criteria no longer historically possible for lyric poetry, that war "poetry" needs to totally reinvent itself if not to be false to the experience it would claim to invoke.  This is not an especially radical or novel claim - as Adorno famously wrote:
> 
> 
> *Should we mourn the sacrifice of the likes of Owen?  Yes, of course.  Are his poems of interest in exposing the contradictions between inherited literary form and the reality of his experience?  In a way, yes.  Is this enough to make him "a great poet"?  I'm saying that the question is itself the wrong question.  *
> ...


6 years and you've learnt nothing.  You're not young.


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## Santino (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> No, on the contrary - I am arguing that poetry needs to meet _aesthetic_ criteria no longer historically possible for lyric poetry, that war "poetry" needs to totally reinvent itself if not to be false to the experience it would claim to invoke. This is not an especially radical or novel claim - as Adorno famously wrote:


You are exposed. You reduce aesthetics to politics.


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## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> 6 years and you've learnt nothing. You're not young.



I was wrong to laud Ezra Pound and Marinetti (though not necessarily wrong that in rejecting linear evolutionism they were had a point).
Why do you disagree with me?


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## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

Santino said:


> You are exposed. You reduce aesthetics to politics.



No, but aesthetics operate in determinate historical/political conditions.  And both history and politics are shaped by certain notions of form and value that relate to the aesthetic.


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## killer b (Nov 11, 2011)

i'm not sure if i get the point of this thread. i don't think this is a failing on my part.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> I was wrong to laud Ezra Pound and Marinetti (though not necessarily wrong that in rejecting linear evolutionism they were had a point).  Also that Dada marked a full stop in a certain way of viewing literary value not a way forward.  The question has to shift registers altogether.
> 
> Why do you disagree with me?


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> I was wrong to laud Ezra Pound and Marinetti (though not necessarily wrong that in rejecting linear evolutionism they were had a point).
> Why do you disagree with me?


because you're a cock who confuses formal innovation for worth. You don't know or understand what you condemn by doing so. It's why you got destroyed in the av vote. It's all a joke.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> No, but aesthetics operate in determinate historical/political conditions.  And both history and politics are shaped by certain notions of form and value that relate to the aesthetic.


free flowing social realism.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

killer b said:


> i'm not sure if i get the point of this thread. i don't think this is a failing on my part.


The point is to interrogate the near universal assumption that the poetry of people like Wilfred Owen is either a fitting testimony of those who died in WWI or that it belongs in some canon of great Eng Lit the value of which is incontestable.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2011)

You genuinely don't know how embarrassing 80s this argument is do you?


----------



## Santino (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> The point is to interrogate the near universal assumption that the poetry of people like Wilfred Owen is either a fitting testimony of those who died in WWI or that it belongs in some canon of great Eng Lit the value of which is incontestable.


You're the only twat worrying about a canon.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> The point is to interrogate the near universal assumption that the poetry of people like Wilfred Owen is either a fitting testimony of those who died in WWI or that it belongs in some canon of great Eng Lit the value of which is incontestable.


them cunts shopping having their tea

Puncturing the balloon. The one done 100 years ago.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2011)

Hey
there are other views
A8


----------



## killer b (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> The point is to interrogate the near universal assumption that the poetry of people like Wilfred Owen is either a fitting testimony of those who died in WWI or that it belongs in some canon of great Eng Lit the value of which is incontestable.


how's that coming along then?


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2011)

What is the more fitting testimony a8?


----------



## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> because you're a cock who confuses formal innovation for worth. You don't know or understand what you condemn by doing so. It's why you got destroyed in the av vote. It's all a joke.



[I don't see where you earn your triumphalism re the AV vote from.  My predictions have been born out.  The result strengthened the position of the Tories *without* noticeably weaking the coalition (as you predicted so insistently)].
I'm far from dismissive of tradition per se - it's pressing traditions into serving a function they were never designed to serve I have a problem with.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> What is the more fitting testimony a8?



The most fitting testimony to the dead of WWI would be a socialist revolution in Europe


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> The most fitting testimony to the dead of WWI would be a socialist revolution in Europe


fuck off you massive try hard cock


----------



## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> You genuinely don't know how embarrassing 80s this argument is do you?


It's a battle mostly won.  Mostly, but not totally.  How many critical voices re the war poets do you ever hear?


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> [I don't see where you earn your triumphalism re the AV vote from.  My predictions have been born out.  The result strengthened the position of the Tories *without* noticeably weaking the coalition (as you predicted so insistently)].
> I'm far from dismissive of tradition per se - it's pressing traditions into serving a function they were never designed to serve I have a problem with.


how has it strengthened the tories?

The rest is waffle.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> fuck off you massive try hard cock


how would you answer your own question?


----------



## Greebo (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> The point is to interrogate the near universal assumption that the poetry of people like Wilfred Owen is either a fitting testimony of those who died in WWI or that it belongs in some canon of great Eng Lit the value of which is incontestable.


Do you realise quite how embarassing it is for this subject to be debated by somebody who seems to have butchered the English language with every post they've made on this thread?


----------



## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> how has it strengthened the tories?
> The rest is waffle.



a) it bought Cameron kudos within their own ranks, if only temporarily
b) it means effectively they will go unchallenged in what might otherwise have been marginal seats
c) it meant they didn't even have to pay a price for their boundary changes (which the prospect of AV seduced the LDs into voting through)


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> It's a battle mostly won.  Mostly, but not totally.  How many critical voices re the war poets do you ever hear?


loads. Some informed too.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

where?


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> a) it bought Cameron kudos within their own ranks, if only temporarily
> b) it means effectively they will go unchallenged in what might otherwise have been marginal seats
> c) it meant they didn't even have to pay a price for their boundary changes (which the prospect of AV seduced the LDs into voting through)


you insured all of this would happen c is the price you made everyone else pay for your principles. Well done thanks.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> where?


no, maybe it's only you.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

err - no.  I (and others) argued consistently against the boundary changes, and against having them both in the same bill - it was the LDs who took no notice.  And helped to lose their own referendum in the process.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> no, maybe it's only you.


beneath the bluster, you really are quite a conservative


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Nov 11, 2011)

At least hear a more modern poet. Here is the late Adrian Mitchell:


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> beneath the bluster, you really are quite a conservative


nothing as conservative as bigging up dada in 2005 

Your reading of cultural history is so sewell it hurts.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

I would have thought in an era of war and imperialism Dada is worth bigging up now (or 2005) as much as ever?


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> I would have thought in an era of war and imperialism Dada is worth bigging up now (or 2005) as much as ever?


conservative much?


----------



## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

Just a pity there isn't a movement of contemporary neo-Dadaists to reinvent aesthetic nihilism anew


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> Just a pity there isn't a movement of contemporary neo-Dadaists to reinvent aesthetic nihilism anew


you could acquaint them with the rules of real poetry.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

rule 1) rip up the rules, rule 2) there are no more rules


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2011)

3) join labour 4) there is a middle ground c) I strive for it to destroy labour 7) vote labour


----------



## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

Perhaps being a socialist in the Labour Party is the ultimate in neo-Dadaist gesture?


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> Perhaps being a socialist in the Labour Party is the ultimate in neo-Dadaist gesture?


no, it makes you a two faced cock


----------



## jesuscrept (Nov 11, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> no, it makes you a two faced cock



Fucking Jesus, you love internet arguing.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

In the absence of better alternative, I can work with other socialists in my CLP (there is a small group) to campaign against the policy being pursued by the Labour group on the council and to select an anti-cuts candidate for the upcoming by-election.

Not glamourous, not much in the way of radical cred to be earned.  But worthwhile in the absence of anything better


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> In the absence of better alternative, I can work with other socialists in my CLP (there is a small group) to campaign against the policy being pursued by the Labour group on the council and to select an anti-cuts candidate for the upcoming by-election.
> 
> Not glamourous, not much in the way of radical cred to be earned.  But worthwhile in the absence of anything better


you can campaign Against the cuts that the party that you're a member of voted for in your ward? Wow, such  freedom rarely knocks on doors such as these.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2011)

You do know that you're shit right?

Really really shit.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

campaigning inside - as well as outside - makes for a bit more nuisance.  If i left I wouldn't do anything different - except not be able to harangue them at internal meetings too.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> You do know that you're shit right?
> 
> Really really shit.



Shit at what?


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2011)

Text based arguing


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> campaigning inside - as well as outside - makes for a bit more nuisance. If i left I wouldn't do anything different - except not be able to harangue them at internal meetings too.


Yeah, you're a right old problem for miliband. Paid your subs this year?

I notice the 'them' narrative here - you are 'them'. You congrat the worst sort of new labour scum on being promoted. Because you're a two faced cunt -one face here another face to the bubble.


----------



## redsquirrel (Nov 11, 2011)

Rereading that thread, anyone remember what happened to Batley?


----------



## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

well I've had less practice than you - you could have a 20page thread of your own where you debate with phantom interlocutors of your own creation


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2011)

redsquirrel said:


> Rereading that thread, anyone remember what happened to Batley?


Taking ken bates out. Hush hush mission.Taking his time mind.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> well I've had less practice than you - you could have a 20page thread of your own where you debate with phantom interlocutors of your own creation


Yet, i choose not to. I think this says somethng about us both.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> You congrat the worst sort of new labour scum on being promoted. Because you're a two faced cunt -one face here another face to the bubble.


that's a backhanded compliment, like being congratulated on being the captain of the Titanic


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2011)

articul8 said:


> that's a backhanded compliment, like being congratulated on being the captain of the Titanic


No it's not, it's calling you an ongoing two faced cunt.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 11, 2011)

This is a thread on which I'm arguing exactly (more or less) what I argued 6 years ago.  Not that two faced


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 11, 2011)

Er...they were teenage swoon stuff then they're teenage swoon stuff now. The lack of connect to real life remains. What's the result of the worst sort of slavish formalism with imposed content - socialist realism. Well done a8.


----------



## littlebabyjesus (Nov 12, 2011)

> ‘Twas in the year of 1874, and on New Year’s Day,
> The British Army landed at Elmina without dismay,
> And numbering in all, 1400 bayonets strong,
> And all along the Cape Coast they fearlessly marched along,
> ...



Now _that's_ war poetry.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 12, 2011)

No it isn't


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 12, 2011)

If Donald Rumsfeld wrote a ditty about known unknowns and unknown knowns, it would still be poetry. It's not about merit or jumping through political, ideological or aesthetic hoops. Poetry is just poetry. I think the only way you can define it is 'not prose' and even then there is room for dissent.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 12, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> What's the result of the worst sort of slavish formalism with imposed content - socialist realism. Well done a8.


since i've nowhere argued for a) slavish formalism (I've spoken about the historical conditions that rendered lyric poetry inoperative) and b) imposed content (where?) then you are plain wrong.


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 12, 2011)

articul8 said:


> since i've nowhere argued for a) slavish formalism (I've spoken about the historical conditions that rendered lyric poetry inoperative) and b) imposed content (where?) then you are plain wrong.


because you haven't the balls to say what you actually mean.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 12, 2011)

Post #86 is what I "actually mean" - unless your employing your paranoiac-critical method again


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 12, 2011)

articul8 said:


> Post #86 is what I "actually mean" - unless your employing your paranoiac-critical method again


has the child moved onto more substantive methods now then now then?

#86 back to the real enduring rules of poetry then. White riot!


----------



## articul8 (Nov 12, 2011)

there is NOTHING about real enduring rules of poetry in #86.  NOTHING.  Where are are you getting this stuff from?  I worry for your sanity sometimes


----------



## Santino (Nov 12, 2011)

How is poetry rendered inoperative (you twat)?


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Nov 12, 2011)

Santino said:


> How is poetry rendered inoperative (you twat)?


"Tap tap, one two, one two, is this mic on? One two one two."


----------



## articul8 (Nov 12, 2011)

Santino said:


> How is poetry rendered inoperative (you twat)?


I didn't say poetry was inoperative (you twat) - I said the tradition of lyric poetry was inoperative


----------



## Santino (Nov 12, 2011)

articul8 said:


> I didn't say poetry was inoperative (you twat) - I said the tradition of lyric poetry was inoperative


You said that lyric poetry was rendered inoperative, which means that, _a fortiori_, poetry is something that can be rendered inoperative.

How?


----------



## articul8 (Nov 12, 2011)

lyrci poetry is a form of poetry.  forms can become historically obsolete.  My contention is that lyric poetry has become obsolete.


----------



## Hocus Eye. (Nov 12, 2011)

You are a naughty boy Santino, playing with words like that - I mean the English ones. You have introduced the 'can be' into play and you didn't credit articul8 with meaning to say "I didn't say *all* poetry".

I think we should stick to attacking him for his appalling politics rather than his use of language.

E2A I now see he has replied in the a similar vein to what I said. I must be wrong.


----------



## Santino (Nov 12, 2011)

articul8 said:


> lyrci poetry is a form of poetry.  forms can become historically obsolete.  My contention is that lyric poetry has become obsolete.



You can't stick to a story for more than a few minutes.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 12, 2011)

try reading what is said - you are what is technically known to literary theorists as a "clueless cunt"


----------



## Santino (Nov 12, 2011)

I'd like to know how a form of poetry is rendered inoperative.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 13, 2011)

Inoperative in the sense that it is no longer adequate to the task it sets itself


----------



## Cid (Nov 13, 2011)

articul8 said:


> lyrci poetry is a form of poetry. forms can become historically obsolete. My contention is that lyric poetry has become obsolete.



Obsolete ≠ inoperative.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 13, 2011)

articul8 said:


> Bit of a beef of mine this - I mean ok there's a certain effect when the forms of romantic poetry collide with the inutterably terribe reality of war. But the result is still an effort to maintain the lyrical coherence of the individual subject.
> 
> I'd say the best "war poetry" is not by Wilfred Owen et al but by Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara.



"Inutterably terribe"?

Sub-ed on holiday?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 13, 2011)

Santino said:


> Tiny giant - that's an oxymoron.
> 
> Cold fire - there's another.



Articulate articul8.

There's another.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 13, 2011)

articul8 said:


> Laughing in the face of po-faced hand-wringing poetic conceitedness



Trans: Look at me, I'm iconoclastic, me!


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 13, 2011)

articul8 said:


> The point is to interrogate the near universal assumption that the poetry of people like Wilfred Owen is either a fitting testimony of those who died in WWI or that it belongs in some canon of great Eng Lit the value of which is incontestable.



There is no "near universal assumption". You appear to be mistaking representation for reality, and the ubiquity of use in media representations of such forms for public sentiment.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 13, 2011)

Is it not logical to assume that repeated media tropes are in some sense indicative of a wider cultural memory?


----------



## Santino (Nov 13, 2011)

articul8 said:


> Is it not logical to assume that repeated media tropes are in some sense indicative of a wider cultural memory?


You don't know what "assume" means.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 13, 2011)

assume - as in to make the assumption.  What else does it mean?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 13, 2011)

articul8 said:


> Is it not logical to assume that repeated media tropes are in some sense indicative of a wider cultural memory?



It might be logical if those tropes were provably genuine representations of public sentiment, but in a media-saturated environment where tropes can be broadcast almost instantaneously across the entire diversity of media, represented and then multiplely reinforced, it's not at all logical to make such an assumption.


----------



## Santino (Nov 13, 2011)

articul8 said:


> assume - as in to make the assumption.  What else does it mean?


It doesn't mean to take one thing as evidence of something else. That's the opposite, in many ways.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 13, 2011)

Media trope are indeed self-reinforicing - which is precisely why they are key determinants of cultural memory.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 13, 2011)

Santino said:


> It doesn't mean to take one thing as evidence of something else. That's the opposite, in many ways.



assume, logically infer or deduce, whatever.  The point stands


----------



## Streathamite (Nov 13, 2011)

articul8 said:


> Is it not logical to assume that repeated media tropes are in some sense indicative of a wider cultural memory?


not if 'repeated media tropes' are a by-product of a smug, insular, culturally worthless media 'community' which has f-all to do with the culture and experiences of the wider society


----------



## Streathamite (Nov 13, 2011)

articul8 said:


> Perhaps being a socialist in the Labour Party is the ultimate in neo-Dadaist gesture?


nope, just the actions of a mug who doesn't realise he's been conned and is wasting his time


----------



## articul8 (Nov 13, 2011)

Streathamite said:


> not if 'repeated media tropes' are a by-product of a smug, insular, culturally worthless media 'community' which has f-all to do with the culture and experiences of the wider society



But people today are never going to "experience" life between 1914-18?


----------



## Streathamite (Nov 13, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> them cunts shopping having their tea
> 
> Puncturing the balloon. The one done 100 years ago.


too cryptic, please elucidate


----------



## articul8 (Nov 13, 2011)

Streathamite said:


> nope, just the actions of a mug who doesn't realise he's been conned and is wasting his time


I might be wasting my time but am not blind as to what the party leadership represents.


----------



## Streathamite (Nov 13, 2011)

articul8 said:


> But people today are never going to "experience" life between 1914-18?



irrelevant to the point I was making


----------



## Streathamite (Nov 13, 2011)

articul8 said:


> I might be wasting my time but am not blind as to what the party leadership represents.


no, but you still - mystifyingly - see some valuye to continued membership. everything over the past 20 years should have cured you of this delusion


----------



## articul8 (Nov 13, 2011)

Streathamite said:


> no, but you still - mystifyingly - see some valuye to continued membership. everything over the past 20 years should have cured you of this delusion



This isn't really the place for that discussion - except to say that the experience of building left parties outside Labour (from the ILP split of the 30s to the SA, Respect and TUSC) doesn't exactly give you much hope of making a go of it outside either


----------



## Cid (Nov 13, 2011)

articul8 said:


> But people today are never going to "experience" life between 1914-18?



So where does that leave you as the arbiter of how people of that era expressed their experience of it?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 13, 2011)

articul8 said:


> Media trope are indeed self-reinforicing - which is precisely why they are key determinants of cultural memory.



In a world governed by people who don't look beyond the surface that may well be true, but even *you* don't only inform yourself via such tropes, however much you might wish to impress them on others.


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 13, 2011)

Wtf has any of this got to do with poetry?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 13, 2011)

articul8 said:


> assume, logically infer or deduce, whatever. The point stands



Assumption, deduction and logical inference may be generally inter-related, but they're hardly the same thing, as you appear to be implying.

Stop trying so hard.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 13, 2011)

Orang Utan said:


> Wtf has any of this got to do with poetry?



Nothing. It's putatively to do with the attitudes toward a poetic form that articul8 is claiming is prevalent.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 13, 2011)

I'm not the arbiter - I'm just asking whether certain out-dated literary forms are adequate to the subject they attempt to deal with


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 13, 2011)

I still don't see how writing poems about war is invalid or whatever the fuck you are trying to say


----------



## JimW (Nov 13, 2011)

Just read some Ivor Gurney for the first time in ages because of this thread, not my favourite poet but always had a soft spot for him. He seemed to find the form adequate too, so far as I'm in a position to judge. Can't really see where you're going with this.


----------



## Cid (Nov 13, 2011)

articul8 said:


> I'm not the arbiter - I'm just asking whether certain out-dated literary forms are adequate to the subject they attempt to deal with



Out-dated _now_ and _in your opinion_... In any case your title should have been 'I believe that the lyric poem is an inadequate form for the expression of the experience of war - discuss' or something rather than 'war poetry - an oxymoron'.


----------



## Pinette (Nov 13, 2011)

All suffering is a theme for poetry and so is love, death, happiness, everything.  I didn't want to look at this thread because I knew it would make the b.p go up, but now are you saying that we cannot assume that war poetry is poetry and that Wilfred Owen is not a poet or Sassoon was not a poet or that Reed was not or that.... I can't write any more.  Bang, bang - How easy it is to make a ghost!


----------



## Pinette (Nov 14, 2011)

Cid said:


> Out-dated _now_ and _in your opinion_... In any case your title should have been 'I believe that the lyric poem is an inadequate form for the expression of the experience of war - discuss' or something rather than 'war poetry - an oxymoron'.


[quote="articul8, post: 10634858


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 14, 2011)

articul8 said:


> I'm not the arbiter - I'm just asking whether certain out-dated literary forms are adequate to the subject they attempt to deal with



Outdated as of when? You appear to be falling into the error of assessing non-contemporary eneavour via contemporary opinion/analysis, which is most often an exercise in stupidity (as opposed to futility) because it usually divorces the subject from its context.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 14, 2011)

Pinette said:


> All suffering is a theme for poetry and so is love, death, happiness, everything. I didn't want to look at this thread because I knew it would make the b.p go up, but now are you saying that we cannot assume that war poetry is poetry and that Wilfred Owen is not a poet or Sassoon was not a poet or that Reed was not or that.... I can't write any more. Bang, bang - How easy it is to make a ghost!



Poetry, lyric or prose, "concrete" or "metaphysical", has always been an outstanding form for capturing and transmitting a view of the emotion(s) of a subject, as well as of the subject itself. While articul8 may claim that lyric poetry isn't up to the task of describing/memorialising war, it's a very plain fact that poets, from across the classes and ranks, have managed to describe and memorialise their own perceptions of war, and that's *all*, in the final analysis, that we can expect of any art and any artist.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 14, 2011)

My claim is that the form of the individual bourgeois subject is inextricably bound up with the social relations that led to the catastrophe of mass industrial warfare.  The view that language is a medium for the individual to express some private, personal experience is a mystification, an ideological manoeuvre, a way of avoiding the recognition that was is most uniquely "ours" is a social product through and through.


----------



## Orang Utan (Nov 14, 2011)

Bollocks


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 14, 2011)

articul8 said:


> My claim is that the form of the individual bourgeois subject is inextricably bound up with the social relations that led to the catastrophe of mass industrial warfare. The view that language is a medium for the individual to express some private, personal experience is a mystification, an ideological manoeuvre, a way of avoiding the recognition that was is most uniquely "ours" is a social product through and through.


Have you been on an alpha course recently?


----------



## articul8 (Nov 14, 2011)

? come again?


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 14, 2011)

I think you should- it might help you in your developing understanding of why we are not alone and how use of language is bourgeois individualism at is despicable worst.


----------



## articul8 (Nov 14, 2011)

No - you've lost me


----------



## butchersapron (Nov 14, 2011)

Isn't that that what you're after?


----------



## Fuchs66 (Nov 14, 2011)

Ah bollocks not worth it!


----------



## Pinette (Nov 14, 2011)

articul8 said:


> My claim is that the form of the individual bourgeois subject is inextricably bound up with the social relations that led to the catastrophe of mass industrial warfare. The view that language is a medium for the individual to express some private, personal experience is a mystification, an ideological manoeuvre, a way of avoiding the recognition that was is most uniquely "ours" is a social product through and through.


You are Stanley Unwin and I claim my £5 -


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 15, 2011)

articul8 said:


> My claim is that the form of the individual bourgeois subject is inextricably bound up with the social relations that led to the catastrophe of mass industrial warfare.



The individual subject is bound up in such a way, _bourgeois_ or not. Membership of the _bourgeoisie_ is irrelevant unless you're attempting to label war poetry as a distinctly _bourgeois_ art form, which it demonstrably isn't.



> The view that language is a medium for the individual to express some private, personal experience is a mystification, an ideological manoeuvre...



The view that language is a medium for the individual to express *any* private, personal experience has demonstrable clarity and relevance that may or may not, depending on how it is interpreted, mystify and/or ideologise a subject or experience.



> a way of avoiding the recognition that was is most uniquely "ours" is a social product through and through.



Because, of course, everyone claims that war just somehow manifests from nothingness and is entirely divorced from society, don't they?

I'd ask you to have a word with yourself, but I fear you require much stronger medicine.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Nov 15, 2011)

Pinette said:


> You are Stanley Unwin and I claim my £5 -



He'll have you know that's *professor* Stanley Unwin to you!


----------



## Pinette (Nov 15, 2011)

ViolentPanda said:


> He'll have you know that's *professor* Stanley Unwin to you!


'Professor' -  that is a 'word'. A  mere 'word' that bears no relevance to anything or anybody, simply a tacit declaration of superiority. A social product merely.  Words, words, words......How they tire me.


----------



## Santino (Nov 15, 2011)

Pinette said:


> 'Professor' -  that is a 'word'. A  mere 'word' that bears no relevance to anything or anybody, simply a tacit declaration of superiority. A social product merely.  Words, words, words......How they tire me.


I'm not sure you can have a tacit declaration.


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## Pinette (Nov 15, 2011)

Fair cop, Guv!  I have been totally demystified.  Thanks for nothing!


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## Pickman's model (Nov 15, 2011)

Pinette said:


> 'Professor' - that is a 'word'. A mere 'word' that bears no relevance to anything or anybody, simply a tacit declaration of superiority. A social product merely. Words, words, words......How they tire me.


if words tire you so (diddums) then what the fuck are you doing typing them in and reading them here? eh?


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## Pinette (Nov 15, 2011)

Pickman's model said:


> if words tire you so (diddums) then what the fuck are you doing typing them in and reading them here? eh?


You're in a bad mood this evening Pickman's, so won't take it personally.


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## Pickman's model (Nov 15, 2011)

Pinette said:


> You're in a bad mood this evening Pickman's, so won't take it personally.


you might as well take it personally, i don't mind.


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## ViolentPanda (Nov 16, 2011)

Santino said:


> I'm not sure you can have a tacit declaration.



You can, you just mumble it.


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## Random (Nov 16, 2011)

Articul8 and Black Hand are evidence that academia rots your brain.


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## Random (Nov 16, 2011)

articul8 said:


> My claim is that the form of the individual bourgeois subject is inextricably bound up with the social relations that led to the catastrophe of mass industrial warfare.


 And you're arguing this on the Internet - a system developed to organise nuclear warfare. Oh the irony! The irony!


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## Greebo (Nov 16, 2011)

Random said:


> And you're arguing this on the Internet - a system developed to organise nuclear warfare. Oh the irony! The irony!


Also developed AFAIK to maintain communications after nuclear warfare.


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## Edie (Nov 16, 2011)

articul8 said:


> even in protesting the war at the level of content, in terms of form it (ie. war poetry as traditionally conceived) maintains the emphasis on the individual subject of lyric poetry without problematising that bourgeois narrative, which is ultimately part and parcel of the system that produced the war in the first place. I contend


Wow. _What_?!


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## Random (Nov 16, 2011)

And articul8's arguing this using impenetrable academic jargon - a language form that was developed to secure the power of the upper classes - the same upper classes that were responsible for Galipolli! The irony!


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## Edie (Nov 16, 2011)

articul8 said:


> My claim is that the form of the individual bourgeois subject is inextricably bound up with the social relations that led to the catastrophe of mass industrial warfare. The view that language is a medium for the individual to express some private, personal experience is a mystification, an ideological manoeuvre, a way of avoiding the recognition that was is most uniquely "ours" is a social product through and through.


This is fuckin priceless  You taking the piss?

If you can't explain yourself in a way that most people can understand your probably talking bollocks.


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## Greebo (Nov 16, 2011)

Random said:


> And articul8's arguing this using impenetrable academic jargon - a language form that was developed to secure the power of the upper classes - the same upper classes that were responsible for Galipolli! The irony!


I'd agree about the irony, but impenetrable?   Nah!  You could lower the register of what he said and IMHO it'd still be tosh.


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## Edie (Nov 16, 2011)

What is he trying to say Greebo? That cos poets are part of the society involved in the war, they can't really express a personal insightful experience. So war poetry is just a biased product of war, not a private reflection. So therefore it aint poetry.

Or something COMPLETELY different


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## Orang Utan (Nov 16, 2011)

i think you've got it spot on actually edie.


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## Random (Nov 16, 2011)

Edie said:


> What is he trying to say Greebo? That cos poets are part of the society involved in the war, they can't really express a personal insightful experience. So war poetry is just a biased product of war, not a private reflection. So therefore it aint poetry.
> 
> Or something COMPLETELY different


 Roughly that, but more bollocks. He's bought the idea that poetry is always about the sorrows of a special soulful individual, and saying that this concept is inevitably bound up with capitalism, competition and war. He's taken at face value an elite reading of literature, and then righteously accusing all of us for believing it.


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## Greebo (Nov 16, 2011)

Edie said:


> What is he trying to say Greebo? That cos poets are part of the society involved in the war, they can't really express a personal insightful experience. So war poetry is just a biased product of war, not a private reflection. So therefore it aint poetry.
> 
> Or something COMPLETELY different


More or less that, Edie.  Except that IMHO he's too thick to be able to express it in plain English.


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## Greebo (Nov 16, 2011)

Random said:


> Roughly that, but more bollocks. He's bought the idea that poetry is always about the sorrows of a special soulful individual, and saying that this concept is inevitably bound up with capitalism, competition and war. He's taken at face value an elite reading of literature, and then righteously accusing all of us for believing it.


Thank you, Random, for reminding me exactly why I hated English Lit.


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## Edie (Nov 16, 2011)

Random said:


> Roughly that, but more bollocks. He's bought the idea that poetry is always about the sorrows of a special soulful individual, and saying that this concept is inevitably bound up with capitalism, competition and war. He's taken at face value an elite reading of literature, and then righteously accusing all of us for believing it.


When people talk about different "readings" of literature or poetry or whatever, does that mean how they see it given their social background?


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## Orang Utan (Nov 16, 2011)

or political orthodoxy. or view of literary theory.


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## Greebo (Nov 16, 2011)

Edie said:


> When people talk about different "readings" of literature or poetry or whatever, does that mean how they see it given their social background?


Yes, but then again everyone's perception (and understanding) of everything is biased to some extent.  eg, an art group, drawing a live (but not "life") model - One give the model a beak of a nose and sinister shadows under the eyes, one give the model the very latest hairstyle (ignoring the model's real hair), one makes the face sullen, another makes it animated, one changes the neckline of the shirt, another changes the shape of the ears, or the fingers...

They're all trying to do a picture of the same person in the same pose, but depending on how they feel about that person, and what they find easiest to draw, no two pictures will ever be the same.


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## articul8 (Nov 16, 2011)

Random said:


> Roughly that, but more bollocks. He's bought the idea that poetry is always about the sorrows of a special soulful individual, and saying that this concept is inevitably bound up with capitalism, competition and war. He's taken at face value an elite reading of literature, and then righteously accusing all of us for believing it.



This is NOT what I'm arguing

I'm not saying people can't write "poems" about war. Of course they can. But does it follow that a war poem should be judged on how "authentically" it recreates a picture or re-tells a narrative of what war was "really like"? Or that it's a really sincere reflection of what someone felt about it? Is this all we want art to do? Can't it say something more than this, become a more properly _ poetic form _?

(edit - answering my own questions, I'd say yes.  Poetry needn't be about expressing the private experience or inner feeling of the self, it is about the transformation of how we experience the world - and this is always about the way our world is ordered and can be re-ordered.)


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## Orang Utan (Nov 16, 2011)

why *can't* it just be one person's perception of what they have experienced?


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## Santino (Nov 16, 2011)

articul8 said:


> This is NOT what I'm arguing
> 
> I'm not saying people can't write "poems" about war. Of course they can. But does it follow that a war poem should be judged on how "authentically" it recreates a picture or re-tells a narrative of what war was "really like"? Or that it's a really sincere reflection of what someone felt about it? Is this all we want art to do? Can't it say something more than this, become a more properly _poetic form _?


Who's saying any of these things you're getting so het up about?


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## Santino (Nov 16, 2011)

When you think about it, drawings of owls are an oxymoron too.


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## articul8 (Nov 16, 2011)

It's why certain forms of writing about the war (say Wilfred Owen) become celebrated as part of the romantic death cult that is "Remembrance Day".  There's something in its form that makes it subject to this kind of appopriation.


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## Santino (Nov 16, 2011)

articul8 said:


> It's why certain forms of writing about the war (say Wilfred Owen) become celebrated as part of the romantic death cult that is "Remembrance Day". There's something in its form that makes it subject to this kind of appopriation.


Who says?


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## Orang Utan (Nov 16, 2011)

articul8 said:


> It's why certain forms of writing about the war (say Wilfred Owen) become celebrated as part of the romantic death cult that is "Remembrance Day". There's something in its form that makes it subject to this kind of appopriation.


not everyone celebrates wilfrid owen's poetry as part of a romantic death cult. some of us appreciate it as a poignant articulation of the horrors of war.


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## articul8 (Nov 16, 2011)

Orang Utan said:


> why *can't* it just be one person's perception of what they have experienced?



On one level it can. But it although it might be true and sad it wouldn't necessarily be particularly interesting as a piece of writing beyond that. It gets really interesting at an aesthetic level when that individual's experience is turned against itself and convention forms of language and expression are turned against themselves, where does this one person find himself a language, a set of concepts, a literary form, an idea of subjectivity... the things that are necessary to express any experience - none of these things are possible outside of social relations - the wider world - a world that is destroying itself and offering possibilities for recreating itself differently.

Wouldn't a war poem be more interesting if it reflected that (I've been deliberately provocative - maybe there is really great war poetry out there - I just don't find Owen, Sassoon etc as interesting from an aesthetic angle).

[edit - actually even here I'm exaggerating a bit - a poem like "Strange Meeting" starts to become interesting - the dream/vision form takes it in this direction)


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## Orang Utan (Nov 16, 2011)

articul8 said:


> On one level it can. But it although it might be true and sad it wouldn't necessarily be particularly interesting as a piece of writing beyond that. It gets really interesting at an aesthetic level when that individual's experience is turned against itself and convention forms of language and expression are turned against themselves, where does this one person find himself a language, a set of concepts, a literary form, an idea of subjectivity... the things that are necessary to express any experience - none of these things are possible outside of social relations - the wider world - a world that is destroying itself and offering possibilities for recreating itself differently.
> 
> Wouldn't a war poem be more interesting if it reflected that (I've been deliberately provocative - maybe there is really great war poetry out there - I just don't find Owen, Sassoon etc as interesting from an aesthetic angle.


you're asking too much of it.


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## Santino (Nov 16, 2011)

When you say 'I've been deliberately provocative', do you mean 'I've been a dick and I'm trying to backtrack'?


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## Greebo (Nov 16, 2011)

articul8 said:


> <snip>Wouldn't a war poem be more interesting if it reflected that (I've been deliberately provocative - maybe there is really great war poetry out there - I just don't find Owen, Sassoon etc as interesting from an aesthetic angle.


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## articul8 (Nov 16, 2011)

Orang Utan said:


> not everyone celebrates wilfrid owen's poetry as part of a romantic death cult. some of us appreciate it as a poignant articulation of the horrors of war.



But it is articulated _on much the same terms_ as the society that threw up the war - and doesn't quite shake off the possibility of being appropriated by a  romantic death cult.


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## Orang Utan (Nov 16, 2011)

and you must be dead inside if you don't appreciate the aesthetics of sassoon and owen's poetry. they write beautifully.


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## Santino (Nov 16, 2011)

Orang Utan said:


> you're asking too much of it.


Not only that, but he's arbitrarily privileging a certain kind of writing, i.e. writing that 'challenges' or whatever bullshit is currently fashionable.


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## articul8 (Nov 16, 2011)

Santino said:


> When you say 'I've been deliberately provocative', do you mean 'I've been a dick and I'm trying to backtrack'?


yes and no


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## Orang Utan (Nov 16, 2011)

articul8 said:


> But it is articulated _on much the same terms_ as the society that threw up the war - and doesn't quite shake off the possibility of being appropriated by a romantic death cult.


so what? anything can be appropriated 'wrongly'


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## articul8 (Nov 16, 2011)

Santino said:


> Not only that, but he's arbitrarily privileging a certain kind of writing, i.e. writing that 'challenges' or whatever bullshit is currently fashionable.



It's not arbitrary.  It's political, ultimately.


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## Orang Utan (Nov 16, 2011)

articul8 is a moronoxy


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## articul8 (Nov 16, 2011)

how witty


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## butchersapron (Nov 16, 2011)

articul8 said:


> This is NOT what I'm arguing
> 
> I'm not saying people can't write "poems" about war. Of course they can. But does it follow that a war poem should be judged on how "authentically" it recreates a picture or re-tells a narrative of what war was "really like"? Or that it's a really sincere reflection of what someone felt about it? Is this all we want art to do? Can't it say something more than this, become a more properly _ poetic form _?


I like the simultaneous dismissal of a constructed authenticity and embrace of ' proper' poetic form.


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## articul8 (Nov 16, 2011)

If you're going to be that pedantic: a poetic form more adequate to the historical conjuncture to which it responds. I'm not making some neo-Platonic argument or dismissing the notion of truth


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## butchersapron (Nov 16, 2011)

articul8 said:


> If you're going to be that pedantic: a poetic form more adequate to the historical conjuncture to which it responds. I'm not making some neo-Platonic argument or dismissing the notion of truth


Oh you mean one constructed historically then. Like what you just dismissed.


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## Orang Utan (Nov 16, 2011)

articul8 said:


> how witty


i'm just turning your name against itself, to ironically contradict its convention, to express a greater truth, and to offer the possibility of change by recreating the name to express an alternative meaning..
_
_


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## articul8 (Nov 16, 2011)

[in response to Butchers] Aesthetic value is historically constructed. I don't see where I denied that. This isn't to say that art should be judged purely as though it were a mirror on the world and authenticity some immediate given. That was my point.


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## butchersapron (Nov 16, 2011)

articul8 said:


> [in response to Butchers] Aesthetic value is historically constructed. I don't see where I denied that. This isn't to say that art should be judged purely as though it were a mirror on the world and authenticity some immediate given. That was my point.


Yet you insist on the possibility of a real proper meaning/form/etc. behind what is historically constructed, one that appears to spring from you alone.


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## Santino (Nov 16, 2011)

Just like AV is the real, authentic expression of the voters' will compared to the constructed, artificial meaning of FPTP.


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## articul8 (Nov 16, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Yet you insist on the possibility of a real proper meaning/form/etc. behind what is historically constructed, one that appears to spring from you alone.



No, I'm arguing from the immanent position of the poet as critic of war - to rest at the level of conventional literary form means to undermine formally the case you are trying to make at the level of content.  No transcendental form from me, just an observation of the contraditions that the poet encounters in his (or her) own task.


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## phildwyer (Nov 16, 2011)

articul8 said:


> Media trope are indeed self-reinforicing - which is precisely why they are key determinants of cultural memory.



Articul8 you've been at the Wiesengrund again.  Don't listen to these wankers, you're making plenty of sense.  I'm a bit poorly or I'd come and give you a proper discussion like.


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## articul8 (Nov 16, 2011)

phildwyer said:


> Articul8 you've been at the Wiesengrund again.


 Finally a charge I can plead guilty to


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## butchersapron (Nov 16, 2011)

articul8 said:


> No, I'm arguing from the immanent position of the poet as critic of war - to rest at the level of conventional literary form means to undermine formally the case you are trying to make at the level of content. No transcendental form from me, just an observation of the contraditions that the poet encounters in his (or her) own task.


Nope, what you're actually doing is identifying a _real_ authenticity and then attempting to say the historically constructed authenticity does not meet its demands (that these demands are merely a banal experimental formalism a century out of date is telling). Its absolute classic old school elitist blue-stockingism.


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## butchersapron (Nov 16, 2011)

The cabaret shut 100 years ago. Time to go home.


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## phildwyer (Nov 16, 2011)

People once thought that Bob Dylan had made war forever impossible: FACT.


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## articul8 (Nov 16, 2011)

butchersapron said:


> Nope, what you're actually doing is identify a real authenticity and then attempting to say the historically constructed authenticity does not meet its demands (that it is merely a banal experimental formalism a century out of date is telling). Its absolute classic old school elitist blue-stockingism.



I haven't ever attempted to put forward a positive "authenticity" - I've proceeded entirely from the negative.  And in fact avant-garde experimentalism can be novelty for its own sake vacuousness.  I was celebrating Dada in its historical moment not arguing that it was some universal blueprint for poetry which quite blatantly is isn't and was never intended to be.


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## phildwyer (Nov 16, 2011)

Greebo said:


> Thank you, Random, for reminding me exactly why I hated English Lit.



You didn't hate it.  It hated you.


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## Pinette (Nov 16, 2011)

Orang Utan said:


> i think you've got it spot on actually edie.


So do I!


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## Random (Nov 17, 2011)

articul8 said:


> If you're going to be that pedantic: a poetic form more adequate to the historical conjuncture to which it responds.


 Like what, for example?


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## DotCommunist (Nov 17, 2011)

war is itself a wordless poem


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## Random (Nov 17, 2011)

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM/BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM/BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM/ BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM.


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## Santino (Nov 17, 2011)

When you think about it, radio documentaries about mental health services are an oxymoron.


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## DotCommunist (Nov 17, 2011)

thats reductio ad absurdum, fans of latin on the internet


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## butchersapron (Nov 17, 2011)

articul8 said:


> I haven't ever attempted to put forward a positive "authenticity" - I've proceeded entirely from the negative. And in fact avant-garde experimentalism can be novelty for its own sake vacuousness. I was celebrating Dada in its historical moment not arguing that it was some universal blueprint for poetry which quite blatantly is isn't and was never intended to be.


That's exactly what i said. That war poetry failed to meet the demands or conditions of this _proper_ poetical form  - that you were arguing 'from the negative' (the few examples you gave of what this might be in this and the time you last did this thread over 6 years ago were outdated formalism - maybe history has moved onto other more _proper_ forms though, not that this matters  if, as we both say that you're proceeding from the negative).


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## ViolentPanda (Nov 17, 2011)

Random said:


> Articul8 and Black Hand are evidence that academia rots your brain.



Wibble?


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## ViolentPanda (Nov 17, 2011)

articul8 said:


> It's why certain forms of writing about the war (say Wilfred Owen) become celebrated as part of the romantic death cult that is "Remembrance Day". There's something in its form that makes it subject to this kind of appopriation.



So the "taking up" of Owen's poetry (among others) between-the-wars had nothing to do with the resonance it found across the classes among those who had experienced war or the effects of war?
Anything can be appropriated and (mis)represented to favour a particular position or interpretation. Making special claims _vis a vis_ a particular poetic form, poet or poem is relativist nonsense.


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## ViolentPanda (Nov 17, 2011)

Santino said:


> Just like AV is the real, authentic expression of the voters' will compared to the constructed, artificial meaning of FPTP.



Ouch.


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## Greebo (Nov 17, 2011)

phildwyer said:


> Articul8 you've been at the Wiesengrund again. Don't listen to these wankers, you're making plenty of sense.<snip>


You can tell that you're probably not making sense when phildwyer agrees with you.


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