It's in the air!

In the last post I spoke about the liberal milieu of the poetry festival I attended. It was a curious phenomenon because there's a very real sense in which poets are the most ordinary of folk, simple observers of the human and natural worlds. Yet even description often carries an underlying morality. The better poets have the vision and discipline to push past socially acceptable grooves, but a mass of people can't help but create an atmosphere. So topics such as motherhood, the migrant experience, George Bush, suicide and observations penned from a café table are all warmly welcomed. Other topics teeter on the edge of comfortableness - but may be appreciated all the more for that. Then there's others that would never actually be written about - hell would be one; a (morally negative) apprisal of abortion another.

This sort of thing became plain when, during a panel discussion, an audience member asked: if a poet is themselves anti-Semitic, it is still okay to read their work? There was a pause, then a number of people tittered at the questioner's audacity - the panel members among them. Yet they knew that there can never be (never?) anything wrong with an honestly-meant question, so prepared to respond. You could almost see them weighing their words before they spoke, such was the delicacy of the topic. Why so delicate and so confronting?

I think it was because the questioner was pushing the room to consider the consequences of their adoration of tolerance, on the one hand, and the evil of Nazism, on the other. She was forcing their collective hand. All were acutely aware that any answer had to display a thoroughgoing rejection of Nazism, an equally thoroughgoing embracing of Judaism, and an affirmation of tolerance and freedom of speech/reading. A minefield indeed!

But no-one commented on the untenable nature of what was going on. Instead they rose valiantly to the challenge. One panel member said that she personally couldn't read something if she knew it was coming from a bad place. Another said that you could read it to garner fuel for an attack. And another pointed out that covert - and racist - passing over of peoples is often worse than anything explicit. And then there was the one that heartened me: Don't refuse to read it just because you don't like the guy, because all humans are arseholes on some level. Amen to that.