From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Thu Jun 08 2006 - 11:06:15 EDT
Depends what you mean by poetry - yes I have written poetry at times, though
not very much of a political kind. I like Cyrus Bina's poem. But I started
to think, my own poetification is becoming banalisation, and stopped writing
it. I'm still in a minimalist phase really. If everything becomes poetry I
start to feel sick, or maybe it is the other way round. You will notice that
I usually clearly separated pop song excerpts from the content of the mail,
i.e. poetry ("mind games") has its place but it should not invade
everything, and if it does, then I'm on the wrong track or ought to be seen
to.
Back in the mid-1980s, I was made secretary of the New Zealand Monthly
Review Society, and we attracted a new editor who someone said had some
experience of journalism. One of the things he did, with some Marxist zeal,
was to ban poetry from the magazine. Oh no, I intuited, the mag is a goner.
And it was, it went out of circulation (well, to be fair, that was not the
only reason). He didn't seem to know that Karl Marx himself penned screeds
of poetry, both romantic and vulgar. Poetry is an expression of human
spirituality, of freedom, and it has to have its rightful place. If you
don't give it its place, it starts to intrude anyway, and maybe in places
where it does not truly belong. Question is not one of banning it, but
giving it its appropriate place.
But anyway, I think at the moment writing mails to OPE-L compounds problems
more than solve them, so I'll take a break from that. Anyway I am not in a
position at the moment to contribute something good to the Sraffa
discussion. To be honest, I did not study him as well as I should have at
the time, mainly because at the time I thought he was too far removed from
Marx.
Jurriaan
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