I don't like disorder; I don't appreciate closeness and intimacy. I don't want a poet's private thoughts, or feelings of affection.
Speaking on the grand scale, ours is a time when the chaos of change over the past couple of centuries has come to an end. Things are steady. History is over and we are settling.
In a settled condition of history, an order must emerge. A hierarchy, and a peaceful 'knowing your place'. The media make their living by assuring us that things are changing, but nobody falls for that.
The friendly investigative poetry of Heaney and Ted Hughes is for us now not worth reading. Some poet speaks of his local place, and another of his own local place. They don't assert that their local place is the best, but they assert that they have a relationship with it. I can't see any interest in their local affections any more. When we grow up we realise that these displays of affection are unworthy of our time and our place in history.
The twentieth century, with its Hughes, Heaney, all those who made so much of death, liberation, destruction; their playing with sacrifice and brutality of life - represent the entire cultural life of the twentieth century: provincial, broken, affectionate, doing all they could to be new, individual, breaking with their own recent history.
I don't like liberation movements because they are now empty. Who cares about the poetry of the troubles, or the poetry of Northumbria, or the poetry of Wales? Poetry lovers, no doubt. But it is necessary today to poetically return to recent history, and to the main trajectory of culture Before the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries and their chaos.
Affectionate, friendly, local, slightly sardonic but 'mystical' poetry - the stuff of Philip Larkin - it did not represent the chaos and doom of the twentieth century then, nor does it now.
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The trajectory of western history is explorative and imperial. Its poetry should be so, too. Perhaps the only proper manufacturing left in the Western world today is in military production. The fact is, an empire does exist - but it is somehow against the spirit of the times to admit it.
When I do business work, I aim to make products and money. When I do military work I aim to win the engagement. When I do politcal thinking, I think along lines of dominating foreign enemies. When I do cultural work, I aim to create elite works of art. Any other objective is a kind of mindless rebellion against actual conditions and the trajectory of our history.
So, the self effacing rubbish of the modern art gallery; the stupid affectionate poetry of the twentieth century; the liberation and Leftist 'philosophies' of then and of our time - these are ineffectual and derisory attempts to break with actual history and our time. Poetry has somehow taken it on itself to rebel against actuality in people like Dylan Thomas - who celebrate their little local place as if it had any significance other than being something private and special for him.
What do I enjoy in poetry? Homer, Virgil, Sophocles, and all the ancients. Yeats, Eliot. The universal and the imperial.
There has only been one effective revolt against history and our inheritance: that was Derrida's philosophy. He naturally despised the Left for its infantile rebellion - which, like the Hippy culture of the 60s, had no power or sincerity or intellectuality in it. Derrida attended closely to our history, and his method of revolt was to posit the fact that there is a divine power beyond reality, or within it, which is nameless. He said that he dreamed and desired an other kind of reality, a future. This is the only way out of where we are. And it is hardly any route at all.
So when the artists and musicians of the twentieth century composed there rubbish - which one may see at any modern art gallery - and in the case of music - which one will never hear - when they composed their rubbish, they carried out a pointless revolt and a pointless affirmation of their peculiar and personal location in the world. But it simply means nothing anymore.
I understand that these are uncensored ideas which could do with some mistiness around them, something to hide the blatant aggression of them. But it's hardly as if anyone is reading this, is it? Besides, One must be be straightforward in a time and when talking to a people who refuse to face reality.
