My interview with G.K. Allum

literature, liberalism, markets

I am over at The Inkwell - Ink & Ribbon Press today being interviewed by G. K. Allum

Allum asked me about the importance of literature, clarity in literary criticism, my work at Mercatus, the dreaded “neoliberalism”, sincerity in modern poetry, whether our taste in art is distorted by markets and social media, my vision for the cultural economy, and a line of poetry I especially love. Here’s a small extract.

Personally, literature meant something to me as literature when I was thirteen or so. That was when I started to love poetry in a significant way. Before that I was a reader of all sorts of things, and I had some appreciation of language for its own sake. But I wasn’t one of those people reading Blake in my kindergarten. There is something reflexive about the nature of literature: everything about a poem relates to everything about the poem. That was what struck me at thirteen or so. (Though honestly how people remember their lives in this sort of detail is beyond me and I may well be wrong about the age.)

And yes, I did talk too much about J.S. Mill…

As for the marketplace of ideas, I hate that phrase! Presumably we are talking about free speech and the clash of truth and falsehood and all that? I don’t think it is a marketplace because there is no purchase involved, though you might say there is trade, I suppose.

Mill talked about this in On Liberty, which is what gets quoted all the time, but also in the “Coleridge” and I think that is a better account of this idea.

You can read the whole interview here. There was no Samuel Johnson, but I did pick Boswell’s Life as my “favourite” book for Mimi Slater.

Allum also did a splendid interview with Victoria Moul recently.

Early modern readers really liked beautifully written poems that conveyed some kind of obvious wisdom. And actually though this sort of poetry is not considered very critically interesting I think modern readers are just the same – Kipling’s ‘If’, a poem that aside from its idioms could well have been written in the 1560s, has repeatedly been voted the UK’s favourite poem, to general critical embarrassment; and think about something like Mary Oliver’s ‘Wild Geese’. Try asking a classroom of students who are not literary specialists – so don’t know they’re supposed to sneer at that kind of thing – if they have been moved by a poem or found one useful and at least a couple will say that one. Early modern readers, like ancient ones, took it for granted that literature was supposed to be useful and on the whole I think they were right.