Doug wrote:
>>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.<<
True enough, but the very notion of having been "given something to say"
presupposes that there is someone to say it to. More, it seems to me hard to
get around the fact that attention to craft, however you define it,
attention to the specifics of language in all its myriad forms and towards
whatever ends--picking up here on Thomas' notion of experimentation being a
means of leading an audience "to a place they do not ordinarily relate
to"--all of that seems to me a form of audience awareness. Not in the sense
of trying to please a specific, particular audience, but rather an awareness
that you have something to say and that saying it is only really "saying it"
if it is comprehensible to someone else, even if that someone else is
initially only yourself. Otherwise, why bother with craft?
Which leads me to the fact that, I guess, my original questions about what
it means to write for an audience were in essence ethical ones about the
writer's responsibility to his or her audience, whether that audience is
(relatively) clearly defined, as in Alison's trilogy for young adults, or
not.
When Thomas poses the parallel questions--When I construct a chair, who will
use it? When I construct a poem, who will use it?--he is in essence asking
about the ethics of making, but the parallelism of the questions obscures
the fact (maybe intentionally) that a chair is a commodity, while a poem is
not, and so the question of how and by whom each is used is not as
straightforward as the parallelism of his questions imply.
Even Rebecca's bringing in "sticks and stones," with its assertion that I
can somehow refuse to be an audience for the words you throw at me--and
think about how profoundly difficult it is not to be an audience for words
that are thrown at you, when you know they are intended for you--points to
the fact that while we may not be able, may not want to imagine a particular
audience for our writing, the act of speaking at the very least implies, at
most asserts outright, that we are aware of and/or want an audience who will
hear us and take us seriously.
What is our ethical responsibility to that audience? This strikes me as
another way of asking Thomas' original question, because in order to answer
it we need somehow to imagine the audience we have this ethical
responsibility to.
Now I've got myself thinking....
Richard
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