>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.

Interesting post, Richard, but words can be thrown at one, even intended for
one, and not 'strike' one, not  in that way to which Edmund lent the word
"beach". I'd guess this why on the streets some kid might say "Hey, are you
talkin' to me?" because the words flying through the air haven't 'struck', could be
meant for anyone, someone else?, the kids one is with? and in saying that is
deciding (out of ego, pride? out of fear of being cowardly or perceived as
cowardly?), etc, is taking up the words, taking up a relationship with them and
with whoever is flinging them as a result. Insults are a kind of manipulation,
seizing one into relationship in a kind of possession by injury. But it is perfectly
possible that one hasn't been 'struck' by them, breached, even if intended to be,
and that the kid who knows this, is self-aware enough to feel whatever in him
has stepped through the verbal flurry without being snagged just keeps going.
This seems to me similar, if a far extension, to poetry readings. The poet may
intend to reach the audience, or in particular ways, for instance, an anti-war
reading, and despite the good intentions, serving the public good, etc, or the
well-craftedness of the poems not 'strike' one. This is I'd guess why Rumi has
struck readers in the West in the way that Saadi hasn't, because his poetry can
strike as poetry, whereas Saadi's is more bound within the rational instructions
of his faith, (though it is a faith that both share the rational instruction to it is
found mostly in Saadi's work). I had a reading the other night with three other
poets and was glad to go to hear them, but while all the work was well crafted
to the point of where one doesn't even think of 'craft', there were some
passages and music that struck me as if 'intended' for me, which I remember
and carried echoing away. So it seems to me that reading is an active process, a
kind of active responsiveness, so that the audience may be struck by, or
breached, by what it hears, but what's heard is various from reader to reader
and it's that variousness of possible response that seems to me to be the mark
of a living poem, that each may hear it as if it spoke to one, profoundly, and yet
this is not anything that the author could have intended for the particularities of
this person or that one and so to think of reaching a particular audience, as if
imagining a target one intended to strike, precludes that variousness of possible
response. But then that's back to fuck the audience, which I too agree with.

Best,

Rebecca

---- Original message ----
>Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2005 16:32:32 -0500
>From: Richard Jeffrey Newman <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: Hi and little magazines
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>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