I must say, before I say what I have to say (get on with it, shouts someone)
that I haven't been paying full attention to this thread due to a pain in
the arse... apologies if this has been said

I find that *knowing I am about to read a poem to an audience, any audience,
pick an audience, may create an awareness in me of the faults of a poem that
I had not acquired otherwise. I have tried to simulate this, but with
limited success.

and / or the act of reading to an audience may have the same effect though
one tries to avoid that - on a number of occasions I have on the hoof
rewritten a poem as I read it i.e. reading the typescript and uttering
something different because some pressure arising from the situation allows
greater clarity

I value good workshops for that alone, that one gets the effects of a public
reading but without the semi-finality

I wonder if others have the same experience

Lawrence























----- Original Message -----
From: R I Caddel <[log in to unmask]>
To: british n irish poets <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 17 January 2000 10:07
Subject: RE: new media and reading aloud


| On Mon, 17 Jan 2000, Mills, Billy wrote:
|
| > Writing for an 'audience' is just about the worst thing anyone can
| > do.
|
| - well, not perhaps as whacky as the pore fish I know in this town who
| writes for "posterity". Wow! I'm all for writing being an act of faith,
| but am unable to extend to this point... Without being too Marianne Moore
| about it, there are so many passable reasons why people might not like my
| poetry, or yours, or anyone's, that I'm still just delighted by the two or
| three evidences one gets that there IS an audience, and try not to analyse
| it too hard... On the other hand, when I'm about to - uh - "perform" I
| still do my level best to find out what kind of "audience" I'm about to
| stand up in from of; it makes a difference (and since "my" audiences are
| usually small, it's usually do-able). Respect for, amongst others,
| YoYo Ma, criticised for doing the Bach Cello Suites live too many times:
| not at all, he sd, I wasn't performing the same work, it was a different
| piece in each circumstance, for each occasion.
|
| But who is the "audience" staring at my work on the page / watching the
| interactive video disk of me (on specially preserved equipment) 100 years
| from now? It all gets a bit message-in-bottlelike, or even, to adapt
| Dorn's phrase, the tensile strength of next winter's icicles.
|
| RC
|
|



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