When I construct a chair, who will use it?

When I construct a poem, who will use it?

Second:

Is an audience in the unconscious - or even
defiance of a particular audience - ?

Experiment, or exploration, means "leading"
an audience to a place they do not ordinarily
relate to?

Tom

>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