Gday Joseph (culturally specific greeting)

I'm grateful for your willingness to pursue this: as I started by
saying, I find this a curly question, ie full of ambivalences for me,
and have some hopes that pursuing discussion may clarify it for me.  But
it's not a major question just an intriguing one (for me) and I can only
deal with it tentatively and personally, in
how-do-I-know-what-I-think-till-I-hear-what-I-say mode
(over-dinner-mode).  Putting stuff in writing always makes it seem too
big and solemn for that mode, so maybe it's  impossible by email.  One
more try, anyway.

When I used the word 'particular' I intended the meaning of
'characteristic to one situation', rather than 'extra-wonderful', though
I now detect that for me there's an overtone of additional pleasure in
the fact that it is characteristic to one situation. The two sorts of
pleasure I mentioned  -  the reading which involves no sense of cultural
barriers, and the reading which very noticeably crosses cultures  -  I
was  reporting as my own experience, and I am not trying to impose on
anyone else my current feeling that the first is (I say, tentatively,
'in some sense') ideal, as something that verges on full communication.
Part of the ambivalence is that, on the other hand, I do value very
highly the diversity of culture, subculture, subsubculture, and the
pleasure of entering into something different, many things different.
There is probably something here about a sense of individual isolation
(at root we each have our own idio-culture?) and the possibilities of
conveying something through the arts that doesn't get conveyed any other
way.

I agree with you that
*" a poet who isn't concerned with audience during the process of
composition is not really writing
poetry, but something else. (That's because I see poetry as
fundamentally public utterance.) But this concern with audience is a
kind of dialogue and has little or nothing to do with "publication," a
notion with which you concern yourself. There is a difference, to my
mind, between publication and marketing."*

I seem concerned here with publication (as some sort of general
distribution, whether by print or screen) because it is usually in that
context that I see notes, in the sense that I was talking about  -  the
chunk of explanatory information  -  coming up.  Don't people append
that sort of note only because they anticipate the poem being read by
someone beyond the 'audience' they were notionally dialoguing with
during composition?  That 'composition audience' is considered in the
way the poem is written, and the needs are probably approached through
integrated means, including those Matthew talked about: the stage
direction, the epigraph etc; and perhaps in marginalia or footnotes
which are designed to be read as part of the poem itself or as a further
poem. Isn't the extraneous note an afterthought, directed to a possible
and unknown range of readers of a journal or book, which may include
people whose background the writer fears may be foreign enough that
she/he doesn't trust there will be understanding?   (At readings, the
content of the note usually becomes a chatty moment before the poem is
read, which is more like dialogue but still differentiated from 'the
poem'.)

It isn't that I see some sorts of writing as clearly delineated as
separate from others; it's that I see the sort of note I'm uncomfortable
with, as separated from what the writer had already finished writing
without it.  The poem was already complete (for the writer) and only
later does it seem that a note is needed, not as part of the poem but to
explain it. Wouldn't the writer usually feel more satisfied if this sort
of note were not seen as necessary, because he/she never regards it as a
part of the poem?

I acknowledge the possibility that one might want to produce that sort
of effect on purpose  -  but all the more reason for not putting the
note on the same page as the poem when one regards it as an unfortunate
necessity.

 Joseph, please claim your dinner next time you are in Melbourne, even
if you don't like what I'm (tentatively) saying!  Best wishes with the
Vietnamese poetry  -  while translation is one particular pleasure,
reading in the original is of course another yet.

ak



%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%