Very interesting questions here, Kit. I'm sort of entertained by your
Black Bernstein idea -- because the Bernstein we have is sort of a
Black Bernstein by your definitions: audience, sound, the web,
performance, etc being his major definitions! But I am very
interested in what you say beyond that: partly because the identity of
the book has changed, in my view, as a result of web publication.
The book has become much more of an object with personality -- I
haven't seen Five Seasons Press books but have a hunch they are
probably excellent in this respect. I publish about half-and-half in
print and on line: there are tensions between the media but, if
anything, web publication serves to enhance, and make more specific,
book publication: a book is something you can hold, give, and/or sell
at readings. As such it is indispensable. The CD/DVD route is
something I haven't explored yet: it really ups the ante in terms of
performance/entertainment/audience address and as such cannot but be
exciting to me. These remarks are rushed but I like the ideas you are
opening up.
Mairead
On 8/24/05, Kit Fryatt <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Been reading this discussion with interest. I wonder if the problem is less
> one of funding bodies dealing in crude identity politics than an
> overemphasis on print publication. Asking *publishers* to find poets to
> fill particular gaps (whether these are age-, gender-, race- or class-based)
> seems to me to be beginning at the wrong end of things, and likely to
> compound the problem of stereotyping in that publishers pressured to publish
> poets on the grounds of identity are bound, at least sometimes, to reach for
> the nearest available Identikit to fulfil a target -- especially if the
> publisher concerned is ill-informed about the particular poetic demographic
> he or she's supposed to be promoting. (An analogy with a university
> access-widening programme that I was involved with as a student suggests
> itself: the programme was itself misconceived, in that it set out to widen
> access by "challenging" potential students' "misconceptions" about the
> institution. In fact, those "misconceptions" by exasperated comprehensive
> school pupils and their teachers were often pretty accurate: the university
> could be (was not always) bloody racist and sexist and snobbish.) At the
> same time, from my experience, which is all I can really speak from,
> interest in non-print forms of poetic expression (the term "performance
> poetry" seems to need a lot of definition which I'm not sure I'm qualified
> to do, but I'm talking about hip-hop poetry, other kinds of collaborations
> with musicians, poetry whose medium is the CD or DVD rather than the book,
> poetry that "doesn't work on the page", highly politicised poetry, poetry
> which requires an audience to be present, heckling maybe, rather than
> privately and quietly reading, amongst other things) seems to be higher
> among non-white poets and non-white audiences than among their white
> counterparts. That's not to say there are no black Bernsteins out there or
> that print and non-print poetries are ever mutually exclusive, it's just
> that the emphasis of this discussion seems to be on print as a desiderata,
> the idea that a printed collection is the sign of a poet having made it.
> What I was wondering, really, is whether that is just a feature of this
> discussion because it grew out of a publisher's tussle with a funding body,
> or whether arts funding as it applies to poetry is generally too
> print-focused. Or, more precisely, maybe, it pays a lot of lip-service to
> performance, but implicitly privileges print?
>
> Best,
>
> Kit
>
|