Any other choices for avant-poets: New readers, preaching to the choir, or, to say it another way, in-breeding, or no readers?
If I can assume that the latter two are undesirable, as much as I love to cuddle up to Silliman's Tjanting, or Saroyan's Pages, or Bromige's My Poetry, how create new readers? Public readings, listservs, and blogs help. Curious readers can encounter disconcerting ideas with no risk. Electronic magazines, too – Sidereality, M.A.G., Shampoo, xStream, and others – foment revolutions in the way and the what readers read. Curious readers sample, again, with no risk. But these are readers already in the quest for contemporary poetry, undoubtedly a microscopic slice of potential readers.
How to develop new readers then? Avant-poets are not answering this question. I’m not sure they are even asking.
I offer: Develop readers before their hate for poetry solidifies that no amount of reading Mayer, Silliman, Notley, Hollo, Mlinko, Saroyan, Perelman, et al chips away at the hardened surface.
When, then, does calcification occur? High school. Junior high school. The teen years. (The best years of our lives? I doubt it.)
Teenagers come to my junior English classes with an aversion to poetry – oh if you could witness the eye-rolling, the shoulder-shrugging, the too-easy blow-off statements such as “That’s stupid” -- yet the wall’s but a brick or two high. They may cringe at the sound poems of B. P. Nichol or Michael Basinski, stare at their desks over/under a poem by Rae Armantrout, question the certification rigmarole that puts this man reading Pavement Saw 7 to a captive classroom of adolescents, yet their minds, developmentally, remain open.
Teenagers grapple furiously, daily, with the world, will die to understand it. It's that god damn urgent. How can poets get in the turbulent mix?
Adolescents are ripe to become life-long readers of poetry. What they crave is what avant-poets crave. Avant-poets illuminate/eliminate/permeate (never hate) our world, its language, its notions of space, time, logic, its perception/reception/deception, its meanings, sensual/essential/intellectual.
My challenge, then, to avant-poets: Approach your local schools. Get into English classes. Talk to students. Read. Write. Keep an open mind. Build the next generation of readers one reader at a time through your own individual work, yes, but also through your own social interactions with younger, unaligned readers.
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