http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Young%20interview.htm
Excerpt:
Sheila E. Murphy: Your organizational and educational experiences seem to
have contributed in a wide variety of ways, bringing on an artistic version
of “deferred compensation.” Given your strong familiarity with the corporate
world, the university environment, and the artistic sphere, please share
your views on the possibility of bringing a wider range of people to poetry.
Is this a fantasy, or is it possible in our current time?
Mark Young: Let me go out on a limb here & say I believe we have already
exceeded the upper limits of the poetic macrocosm, but because there are no
regulations or restrictions, no fire marshalls standing at the entrances
counting the numbers going in, it's going to keep on growing. For a while,
anyway.
Why has it grown so much? Population growth, obviously. More people, more
poets. A world made smaller by technology, & with English the lingua franca
we are now seeing Indian & Chinese & Ghanian poets writing in a second
language as part of the everyday offerings. The exponential growth of
publishing methodology which means more books, more cheaply. More
magazines—duotrope's digest has around 3000 outlets listed. The growth of
MFA programs in creative writing—this is going to be one of the first areas
to go belly up. It's simple economics. People in these programs are trained
only to become teachers of MFA programs in creative writing programs; there
will soon be—if there isn't already—an oversupply of teachers; demand for
the programs will drop off because there's no guarantee of a job on the
other side; & bums on seats is the guiding principle of academia these days.
So it may seem we have opposing points of view, you wanting to bring more
people, me saying there are already too many. But I think we both have
caveats attached, qualifiers perhaps; & what we're both moving towards is
how do we attract more people—whether already in the macrocosm or still to
come—to the type of poetry we care about, to that part of it we both adhere
to.
Let me step outside the sphere of poetics for a moment & quote from a book
that is a cornerstone of my library, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions. In it Kuhn puts forward his beliefs as to why
certain bodies of thought, often exemplified by specific texts, provided the
impetus to change the way particular fields of science were pursued, the way
what he called "paradigm shifts" came about:
They were able to do so because they shared two essential characteristics.
Their achievement was sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring
group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity.
Simultaneously, it was sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of
problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve.
I'll explain why I think Kuhn is relevant. To me, poetics, like politics,
has a reasonably revolutionary left wing & a conservative right. &, again
like politics, it is the left that is full of schisms. Yet the left wing has
a history as strong as that that the right professes to. But these days its
impact is diminished because it's splintered. I have fairly eclectic &
wide-ranging tastes, but when I came back to poetry I found that if I wanted
to read one group of poets I liked I had to go here, & if I wanted to read
another group I had to go there, & another elsewhere, & if I wanted to
see/read vispo, then I had to go searching in 100 places. & yet they're all
essentially related even though sometimes the bloodlines are denied.
Back to Kuhn. We have the "enduring group of adherents"; we have the
open-endedness; what we don't have is a sense of the commonality that
actually does exist even though many practioners spend a deal of time
turning the minor differences into unbridgeable chasms. Somehow we have to
bring things back together again, to show the breadth & the strength of the
left even if the house has many mansions. I think that by doing that we will
attract a wider & better-informed audience. It's what I've tried to do with
Otoliths. […] I think I am succeeding in bringing things back together
again, to show the breadth & the strength of the left even if the house has
many mansions.
