Creating Readers 2

Nick Piombino in a long, thoughtful Thursday, October 23 post, pushes this topic: "It seems to me there is a next step for poets to take after so much insight has been gained through innovative writing, through the struggle with form and formal innovation. I think so much has been accomplished- the form issue has not exactly been "done to death" but it has been done, and done very effectively at that, not that there is general consensus among poets and poetry readers by far, but the territory, and the main avenues have certainly been very well sketched out. It seems to me the next step to take is to pull together all this linguistic advancement in verbal skill and work to connect it to the "forms" or “genres” poets choose to work together cooperatively, not destructively. To understand this means most of all to examine the forms by which we publicly acknowledge what each of us has accomplished, rather than perpetuate the conventional systems of awards and traditional critical and academic apparatus, canon building and the like, negative reviewing and piecemeal scholarly fiefdom creation around specific earlier writers, as well as personalized, systematic, destructive “polemics,"directed at particular individuals. This activity attempts to achieve its own competitive goals by means of a "divide and conquer" mentality, that sometimes leaves the polemicists themselves pathetically isolated."

And unread.

It's pitiful how much energy has been spent fighting for but a few thousand readers of contemporary poetry. Fights between those inside and outside the universities, the supposed canonizers; fights between younger innovative writers and those in the preceding generation; fights about poetry published electronically and poetry published in hard cover; fights over the microscopic print space devoted to reviews of poetry; fights between poets who foreground the performative aspects of poetry and those who do not; fights between small- and medium-presses for distribution... We're squabbling over disappearing crumbs, ladies and gentlemen.

How to bake more bread?

Comments

[graywyvern]

cultivate the allure of the forbidden

[Tom Beckett]

Some brief thoughts... 1. Any affirmative poetics is received in terms of all the things that it is not--there are no guarantees that it will be seen for what it is; 2. All one can do as poet is hew to what one knows in one's heart whilst remaining open to the possibility that one is wrong--to persist, with skeptical fortitude, in the face of apathy and derision is no small thing; 3. A poem is a kiss--it can be received as a gift or an assault.

[tonio]

You know, it's an interesting post you have here. I never got the impression, really, that poets were all that interested in getting a wider audience, unless the usual sneers of disdain at the suggestion have all this time been no more than a defense mechanism.... I never really thought they were. I thought it was a serious matter of artistic integrity and all that jazz. Well, really, though. I happen to have enjoyed the snippets of Jake Berry I've come across lately.... But, alas, turns out I'm a dolt. I'll be the first to admit that in the standards of criticism among poetic circles, that's a reasonable self-assessment. And I won't argue with it. But doesn't make me feel too jubilant about either going out and buying any new poetry (I'll stick with the old stuff, thank you, that everyone 'agrees' is good and wait on the rest as long as the jury's out), or evangelising on behalf of any new poets.