Michael,
I have nothing against those 'abandoned metrical and narrative resources'
(and I don't think they are, btw, except by plain bad poets) but to start
talking about increasing audience is also to start talking marketing, the
truth of the matter is that the only prescription for poets is an allefiance
to the art itself, a very un-businesslike attitude, but poetry isn't a
'business', seem like it though some may make it seem. It's not a romantic
attitude, it's a hard and unpalatable fact, which for most bug-bitten
devotees might mean a lifetime of struggle, but if we just accepted this
fact instead of trying re-cast things in terms of a non-existent large-scale
market perhaps a lot of wasted breath might be saved.
There will always be those, I guess, who try to re-package the art in terms
of gross numbers, but the reality is of reaching through to those who will
listen, not of items for a c.v. or grant application, or the joys of
marketing, publishers by and large regard poetry as a non-starter, except
for a few, mostly dead, names that have smuggled themselves out of the
ghetto.
Not that I'm a pessimist, you can do things to increase the audience, by
perpetuating the infuriating undefinable art, in all its polymorphous forms,
rather than issuing prescriptions for how it should be done. I know it seems
that there was a mythical past in which poetry had an instant route to the
commonality, perhaps even there was, but it's gone now, the linguistic truth
of our world is that the lowest common denominators of speech now succeed,
the commonalities of speech, like those of community, in the 'developed
world', have been ripped apart, appropriated by factions of self-interest. I
suspect all we have left is a desperate hope in one another.
Best
Dave
----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Snider" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, July 08, 2001 10:22 PM
Subject: Re: Poetry in PROSPECT
> Its value is in its accurate portrayal both of the perception of poetry
> in the United States by non-poets and non-academics and of the workings
> of a large part (certainly not the whole, but I think the dominant part)
> of the poetry business in the US, and, I believe, in its accurate
> prescription for one way to increase the audience for poetry -- by
> exploiting the metrical and narrative resources largely abandoned in the
> last century.
>
> Whether one thinks that a worthy goal or pandering depends on personal
> and artistic beliefs which you and I probably don't share. But it does
> not depend on yours or my politics, which I think are much closer than
> our aesthetics.
>
> On Sunday, July 8, 2001, at 03:34 PM, david.bircumshaw wrote:
>
> > Precisely it, Joseph. It's not that there's not a proffesorial strand
> > within
> > US poetry, but it's not the whole story. Nor is proffesorship a
> > necessary
> > invalidation of a person's writing.
> >
> > One of the things that struck me about the Lind article was that it saw
> > things as significant principally in terms of their acceptance within
> > that
> > very academic community it 'professes' to be independent of (it paid
> > lip-service to a wider readership but ...) - most telling was its
> > attribution of the re-incarnation of free-verse in the US to Lowell's
> > mid-life mid-career change.
> >
> > And since Michael has now successively conceded its inaccuracy about a)
> > poetry outside the US (ie the rest of the world) and b) the historical
> > background to the US scene I'd like to know what its value is, other
> > than
> > its interesting by-pass to Gioia's productivity (again, it seems, wrong)
> >
> > Other than Welcome to the End of History
> >
> > Best
> >
> > Dave
> >
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Joseph Duemer" <[log in to unmask]>
> > To: <[log in to unmask]>
> > Sent: Sunday, July 08, 2001 7:32 PM
> > Subject: Re: Poetry in PROSPECT
> >
> >
> >> Michael Snider writes:
> >> <<I said nothing about the historical accuracy of the piece, or
> >> about the accuracy of its claims about poetry other than in the US
> >> -- only that the description of the current scene here seems
> >> accurate.>>
> >>
> >> If you are not willing to defend the "historical accuracy" of the
> >> Lind piece, how can it be an "accurate" description of poetry in the
> >> US? Does American poetry exist outside history? And how can one
> >> endorse the "accuracy" of assertions that are patently false, such
> >> that "professors" have "hijacked" American poetry? Especially when
> >> the only "evidence" for that claim is Lind's HISTORICAL argument
> >> that Pound & Eliot, neither of whom were professors, ruined American
> >> poetry.
> >>
> >>
> >> jd
> >> ======================
> >> Joseph Duemer
> >> School of Liberal Arts, box 5750
> >> Clarkson University
> >> Potsdam NY 13699
> >> 315.268.3967
> >> [log in to unmask]
> >> http://web.northnet.org/duemer
> >> http://www.grammarbitch.com/ppp/index.html
> >> ======================
> >>
> >
>
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