tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3759353.post3042000582008255894..comments2023-08-29T02:42:23.063-05:00Comments on ¡Bemsha SWING!: Jonathanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09371893596402673898noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3759353.post-32292352192330284452010-10-09T09:05:28.573-05:002010-10-09T09:05:28.573-05:00What a weird position: history - biography = conte...What a weird position: history - biography = context.<br /><br />But it gets me thinking about the weirdness of mainstream historical writing in general. What historians "know" about, say, a presidency or a war always seems to move back and fourth between "biographical" and "historical" moments. The only criterion sometimes seems to be what they happened to find documentation for.<br /><br />My view is still that a poem's "poesie" lies in the way it extricates itself from history, which is to say, its political context (and, yes, "the personal" is here political). That's why I had to grant that Kasey was about the "stickiness" of poems (we were talking about flarf). A good poem gets itself out of "the situation" but not without a bit of gore on it. So much as I think we have to look at the "work itself", we can't ignore some of the messy context it's got, as it were, on it.<br /><br />I'm imagining that's what you mean by "relevant" context.Thomashttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04858865501469168339noreply@blogger.com