>in Gioia's eyes, a poet who avoids a mass audience is almost by definition
>arrogant
Personally I like Howard's point about National Poetry Month and why is it that
we poets have to be driven from microphone to microphone in April so
calendared to a big blotch of red inked and pencilled dates, and times, driven
from pillar to post, to be 'amplified bards," to speakah and speakah, and, well,
yes, this is a continuing danger, just today today, I was coming out of class
when I saw a stampede of students rapidly approaching. At first I thought they
were merely moving so quickly because it was only two degrees outside, though
the sun was pouring through all the windows and over the streets, the arctic
wind had dropped upon us like a great ice bird and the flapping of its wings was
swirling the snow off the rooftops and into every frostbit face, but, no, they
were students with the potential to form at any moment into an unruly mob
demanding cowboy poetry and slam performances, forming like a coalescing
amoeba into a mass audiencing for poetry and I began to run, a bit slowly since
the concrete steps were iced, flinging my volumes of poetry behind me as bait,
hoping they would stop long enough to be distracted by the spoils to allow me
to make my escape., though I am not always so lucky in supermarkets when I
may become distracted while choosing which seems to be better today, the
raspberries or the grapes, and the unruly mass audience can suddenly coalesce
around the fruits and vegetables, saying why or why can't you poets be easy and
bardically amplify the song of the rutabagas, but, this time, Fortunately! I was
able to get away with my arrogance intact, though really I would wish for a
better world in which I would not always have to defend my poetic arrogance
with such evasive and difficult tactics. For this results in assuming all manner of
difficulties, taking up extreme vocablaries and syntactical involutions, and as
Carl Phillips was saying the last time I saw him on a street in the rain in
Washington, after hours of drinking wine and eating tapas and talking about our
day in the presence of the esteemed chairman who gave us poetry cd’s and
suggested we become our nation’s ‘amplified bards,” so it was the boldest of
gestures when Carl yelled as he got into the cab, watch out for god’s sake,
watch out where you're going, whatever you do, keep your poetic arrogance
intact!
Best,
Rebecca
---- Original message ----
>Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 17:01:38 +1100
>From: Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Amplified Bards
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>A new horror to watch out for - Dan Goia's "amplified Bard" who will save
>poetry by being popular.
>
>I prefer this kind of approach:
>
>In his intelligent, elegant and valuable defense of poetry, James Longenbach
>emphasizes what poets gain by not being subject to the pressures of a
>high-stakes market or mediascape. "It's difficult to complain about poetry's
>expanding audience," Longenbach says, taking up Richard Howard's argument
>without his caustic tone, "but it's more difficult to ask what a culture
>that wants poetry to be popular wants poetry to be. The audience has by and
>large been purchased at the cost of poetry's inwardness: its strangeness,
>its propensity to defeat its own expectations." In Gioia's eyes, a poet who
>avoids a mass audience is almost by definition arrogant, but for Longenbach
>such avoidance "could also be liberating--the creation of a space in which a
>poem may be pushed to extremes the culture wouldn't know how to purchase
or
>ignore." After all, it is because Emily Dickinson refused to cleanse her
>poems of their unorthodox rhythms and rhymes, thereby preserving a "status
>of seclusion and secrecy," that she and her poems are now so well-known.
>Poems claim our attention, Longenbach argues, inasmuch as they effectively
>resist it.
>
>Quoted in John Palatella's essay in The Nation, which is most interesting.
>
>http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20041004&s=palattella
>
>(Browsed, btw, via Andrew Johnston's reference The Page,
>http://thepage.name/ - always worth checking out)
>
>Best
>
>A
>
>Alison Croggon
>
>Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
>Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
>Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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