I thought this was particularly so, Doug:
>In a sense if you write to find out what it is you have been given to
>say (to paraphrase Robert Creeley)
I can't imagine an audience either. I was thinking about Dominic's short post for
discussion and felt just struck mostly by the phrase "dumb-born" and it seems
that many of my poems begin like that, struck by some phrase, in any number
of ways of being 'struck' and then the poem goes from there, its unraveling what
it has been given to say. Sometimes it's like a particular note, a particular key
but other times some phrase which seems to have the weeds, cultural,
historical, personal, of some field intersecting and embodied in its seed of goad
or goathead. Like that playground refrain "sticks and stones may hurt my bones,
but words will never hurt me" and yet it has always seemed to me they do,
embedding in the skin of feeling, though they have the power to touch in other
ways as well, and it is often just that, some phrase that is like a nexus of various
elements. So felt, the poem replies to it, takes it up within its own skin, in what
it has been given to say.
best,
Rebecca
---- Original message ----
>Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2005 09:31:52 -0700
>From: Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: Hi and little magazines
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>But this leads back to how much you trust an audience, or what kind of
>writing (& its audience) you find yourself exploring. Alison has a very
>different audience for her fantasy trilogy than for her poetry,
>although in a few cases, me for instance, they overlap. And I suspect
>she approaches the concept of audience & what kind of writing she
>attempts for each in different ways as she takes up one or the other
>(n0ot necessarily consciously).
>
>I couldn't (now) write 'for' a particularly imagined audience, partly
>because I can't imagine an audience that way. I can *hope for one, but
>that's different, & post hoc I think the term is.
>
>In a sense if you write to find out what it is you have been given to
>say (to paraphrase Robert Creeley), then the writing is central, not
>the possibe readings. But I suspect we all hope there will be some...
>
>Doug
>
>On 19-Feb-05, at 7:38 AM, Richard Jeffrey Newman wrote:
>
>> In response to Tom's "old question" Andrew wrote:
>>
>>>>> I (really) write for myself - to get my inside self outside, to be
>>>>> able
>> to see it. (As in 'I see what you mean'.)<<<
>>
>> I started writing poetry when I was a teenager because it was the only
>> way I
>> found to prove to myself that I had a voice that could be "heard."
>> (There is
>> a long autobiographical context to this that I will not go into in
>> detail
>> here; there are probably others on this list who began writing for
>> similar
>> reasons: as a way of dealing with external and internal isolation.)
>> And I
>> wanted everyone to read those poems because I felt that, somehow,
>> giving
>> such form to my voice made it, or should have made it, impossible to
>> ignore.
>> Boy was I wrong. When I think about who I write for now, I think the
>> answer
>> is in many ways the same, though what I have to say now is much less
>> rooted
>> in the need I had at the time for personal catharsis, which made so
>> many of
>> the poems I wrote more successful as therapy than as art.
>>
>> But this question of audience, of whom we write for, is interesting in
>> another way, as well. I am teaching an introductory creative writing
>> workshop and we are having our first go-round at my students' first
>> short
>> story assignment. One of the themes that has come up in discussion
>> over and
>> over again is the nature of a written short story as a public
>> document, as a
>> document intended to have/for a public--even if it is only a public of
>> one
>> or, as in the case of my workshop, 16--and how that intention shapes
>> what is
>> required of the author in the shaping of the story. My students have a
>> very
>> hard time with the notion that they should not rely on a reader to
>> give them
>> the benefit of the doubt and assume that he or she will "figure out"
>> what
>> the author "means" no matter how unclear the writing is in some sense.
>> Some
>> of this, of course, simply demonstrates that they are new writers who
>> have a
>> lot to learn, but it also puts a new twist on Tom's question: It's not
>> simply a matte of, For whom do you/we/I write? But what does it mean to
>> write for an audience, any audience, in the first place?
>>
>> Richard
>>
>>
>
>
>Douglas Barbour
>Department of English
>University of Alberta
>Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 Canada
>(780) 436 3320
>http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
>
>Reserved books. Reserved land. Reserved flight.
>And still property is theft.
>
> Phyllis Webb
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