What about the use of a helpful epigraph or stage direction after the title?
I don't use notes as such, but a lot of my poems are monologues and require
some kind of authorial intervention to situate the speaker, eg one has the
stage direction 'Laon, France, June 1940', and another has an epigraph from
Robin Lane Fox's book Pagans and Christians, to make it clear that it is set
in a Roman temple where the speaker is going for some early dream therapy.
When I tried the latter poem out, unannotated, at a workshop, nobody had any
idea what was going on, and the references to elephants and temples made one
person think it was set in India. In fact, it needed the reference from a
learned book (rather than, say, 'Rome, 0 AD') before anyone would believe it
described a real historical theme rather than something I'd made up.
(Workshops are very useful for throwing up this kind of problem - shame I
don't belong to one any more.)
Matthew Francis
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01443 482856
-----Original Message-----
From: Aileen Kelly [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 27 April 2000 15:10
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Notes
This is a really curly question for me.
1. I don't like notes. The poem should stand for itself.
2. But there are good poems that are fully powerful only to a small number
of
people because most readers will lack some (often small) item of context or
background.
2a. And that can be worse for those who live in one place than another.
Places
that have, or are felt as centres for, large poetry-reading populations tend
to
ignore anything that needs awareness of another cultural context. At the
same
time those who are based in these 'centres' tend to assume that those
elsewhere
will know, or should damn well learn, what is needed as context for their
own
work. (So US readers expect that fiction from elsewhere will be adjusted
for
their comprehension, but it is expected that Australian readers will adjust
to a
US text without editorial change.) If you want your poetry published/read
in
the large populations, it needs to be comprehensible to them, even if what
set a
poem going is local to your own culture. It is even the case that Sydney
knowledge is felt to be more 'central' in this sense than that of other
Australian capitals.
And there are all sorts of other specialisations, of course, which give rise
to
a poem that will be strong if you know and may pass you in some respect if
you
don't. There are so many possible variations on 'a decent education' that we
can't even assume that 'any educated person knows...'
3. The compromise I end up suggesting to students is something like: if the
poem
needs a note for everyone but yourself, it is probably not publishable until
you
have a devoted following;
a strong poem should probably be able to stand without a note at least if it
is
published in an appropriate journal (one which is likely to have a
comprehending
readership);
if necessary, a note at the back of the book will probably then make the
poem
accessible to a less selected readership, without making a mess of the
page(s)
on which the poem itself appears.
But all those 'probablies' reflect my discomfort about it.
Aileen
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