Eryk Salvaggio wrote:
>need for the spirits of people to be elevated
>out of the extreme poverty and structure.
My argument: If art is being made, it can't be so very extreme.
Extreme in the sense of irrecoverable, hopeless. Perhaps I
overreacted to the word. Historically, art isn't made in the most
dire circumstances. Aculture flourishes or it dies, or rises and
falls somewhere in between. Even an oppressive regime can feed its
people enough to sustain a bare minimum until the next pendulum swing
or the next revolution, whichever is more affordable, more
'economically determined'....
>As far as that woman who stopped writing poetry to feed her
>children- that doesn't make any sense to me. How does a poet
>stop being a poet? Its impossible. Theres a trick to not losing
>poetry, its called writing it down. Scratch it into wood.
You've fortunately obviously never been hungry enough to forget
everything else in your life, to be so focused on bread and water
that words are a luxury which would destroy you. It's not that the
poetry is finitely religious or magical, it just simply needs to be
nourished with a relatively balanced diet. Without sustenance, it has
no hope of bearing hope and is actually a poison.
Though we see images and hear sounds somehow managed to be made in
the depths of war, I'm not sure that oppressive and relentless
poverty provides the same reactive soil. It's more of a constant
depriving and after a time even the most heroic spirit can be dulled
and destroyed.
>Poetry is not a luxury to a poet; to a poet,
>its an unshakeable [though beautiful] disease.
sure. that, a bottle of wine and thou.
