Richard -
My questions seemed simple, but it is not as we all know.
As you have just extended it to the theoretical, which is
good.
I have been involved with three very different audiences
and have had to tailor my readings for these. Ordinary
people, university people, and poets with experience in
experimental poetry.
One is reading for very different cultural IQs. However, I wonder
if there can be a meeting ground of all three.
Tom
>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
|