structo: It’s not a money-making exercise. constantine: They effectively stopped public funding for the humanities [in universities]. The attitude is now well if you think it’s valuable, then you fund it… It’s bad. It’s a deep philistinism actually. [The Literary Agenda] forced me to write, all in one place, things that I had been saying, and sometimes writing, all over; just trying to define and simultaneously assert the value of poetry in particular, but literature all together.
“It’s through ctions that we get even near the truth” structo: You’ve called it a ‘radical act’, doing this for little to no money. constantine: And I do think that. It might seem far-fetched, but it becomes radical due to the circumstances, because everything you do in that line, whether you like it or not, is actually a riposte or a revolt against something which is there all the time. The risk of that is that you become merely reactive; you define literature negatively as ‘not the market’, which is not good enough. But you don’t exist in a vacuum, you do exist in a context of not total, but quite large, contempt for that way of apprehending things. One of the chapters of the book is called ‘The Office of Poetry’. It struck me very forcibly recently that even quite decent people get into politics thinking that they might help, and you see what happens: there’s this terrible narrowing by virtue of office, because the office doesn’t permit you to be a whole human being. It practically requires of you a kind of déformation professionnelle by virtue of being a politician. I don’t mean that poets by their nature are honourable people, any more than anyone else is, but the office of poetry, the poem, the act of doing it, whatever you’re like personally, it’s not a poem unless you’ve established an area of autonomy in which you’re not only free to tell the truth, but it is actually incumbent on you to try to do it. Whereas in the office of politics, almost the antithesis takes place. By virtue of office you are required to take decisions which are largely one-sided, decisions which are trimmed to particular parties. And heaven knows, when they come to the point where they have to utter these things publicly… it’s shameful really. structo: So it’s by nature radical, rather than by design?
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