> I wonder if I might ask this "old" question:
>
> Whom do poets write for? What is the "audience" we seek
> to communicate with?
>
> Tom
>
Yes, an old question, but one that is always as equally relevant as it is
not.
I (really) write for myself - to get my inside self outside, to be able to
see it. (As in 'I see what you mean'.)
Then, when I have words on paper, I often times show them to friends. They
boo and hiss or laugh and applaud. Whatever.
So, my ego-based self says, Maybe this will win me some attention and some
further applause from strangers, so I send it to a publishing medium - mag
or publisher or email list or whatever. Then I ignore them when they appear
out of some perverse self-preservation mechanism.
Illustrative of my thoughts on all this is my first publication. I used to
frequent a coffee house in Perth called The Coffee Pot when I was a
teenager. I was playing drums and thoroughly into modern jazz at the time,
and poetry was a kind of 'hip' sideline - pseudo beat poetry in rebellion
against the Milton and such I learnt at school (a classical school). I wrote
a 'cool' poem about Oscar Peterson's 'Porgy & Bess' album - which was
couched in pseudo hip language (I was a very white boy in an isolated
capital of the failede British Empire, so what kind of hip could I be?) -
but the poem turned out to be more about the Coffee Pot and the 'ambience'
than the music itself, so I showed it to the woman who ran the joint (who of
course I had a crush on - she had breasts and legs, didn't she!) ... She
loved it and stuck it up on the wall with my name attached to the base. I
took all my shoolmates in to see it on various nights ... My first note of
fame ... It hasn't got much bigger than that, and I still love the memory of
that first publication - like a Broadsheet on an old forest tree.
Andrew
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