Seasonal goodwill to all.
I'm not sure quite what is being recollected, but I have long thought
and argued that many poets don't write for existing audiences, or for
some idea of an audience that pre-exists what new poems might somehow
make possible, not least because the existing audience formations are
limited by histories of exclusion and authority that need to be broken
down... this isn't a prescription or an imperative, but a quality of
poems that they are addressed to more than their immediate and
historically overdetermined contexts... Poetry carries with it a sense
of the histories of song and language in ways antithetical to the world
of prose, and carries too the burden of being accountable to the
imagination and to the future in ways that prose too often surrenders to
a conception of present tense pragmatism..... William Blake and Emily
Dickinson might serve as significant examplars of orientations to the
possibility of poetry as an art, and this also suggests how poems might
also be in dialogue with other poems and not just with readers... but,
then again, it isn't hard to imagine how new social relations would open
up completely new readerships for poetry...
I'd also argue that poetry needs to be thinking about representation as
such rather than about communication, and this has implications for
poetry that attempts to think against the limits of existing humanisms
and anthropomorphic projections....
then again, there are, as Peter Riley has suggested from time to time,
types of poetry that are hostile to any but very specific kinds of
reading in ways that suggest a kind of contempt for existing
readerships, or if not contempt exactly, then an orientation to kinds of
scholarly clerisy or religious / philological cabalisms, kinds of poetry
that wants adherents rather than readers, and such types of poetry are
sometimes hard to distinguish from work that seeks to radicalise and
democratise poetry's conditions of possibility by disputing all forms of
literary authoritarianism...
Poets and poems that win prizes generally accord with existing
hierarchies of taste and authority, and that isn't always a bad
thing.... some great poets know how to play the sensibilities of their
immediate audiences: Shakespeare did this rather well... but in the
limited democracy of modern culture, any poem that looks like it is too
happy about the culture of prizes is fiddling while the fossil fuels
burn.... don't get me wrong, I'd love my poems to win a few prizes...
and having written poems for the giant turtles of Pacuare, I'm proud to
be a runner up in the 2015 Pacuare poetry prize:
<http://www.blurb.co.uk/b/6737178-human-nature-poems-for-pacuare>
Drew
On 17/12/2017 18:05, Jamie McKendrick wrote:
> We should savour these rare moments, Tim. All conducive to seasonal goodwill, given that the list tends to get strangely fractious round xmas.
> But I should add that I'm not picking a quarrel with David either. We both agree - well who doesn't? - that many fine poets fail to receive their just deserts in their lifetime. My only difference, if it is one, is that I reckon it goes with the territory. I don't see why that should come over as 'a bit aloof'.
> As for canon formation, it sounds a bit grand and academic to me. What most poets would be grateful for, I'd guess, is some attentive readers - 'fit audience, though few' - although even this modest proposition, if I'm not mis-recollecting an earlier remark by Drew, has awoken discord here.
> With reference to David's subsequent post, I'm not sure I've met a poet 'afraid of admitting they would like to be "recognised" in some way'. It wouldn't take much bravery to admit most of us may feel that, either on a personal level, or in terms of the public attention to the art, or on both accounts.
>
> Jamie
>
>> On 17 Dec 2017, at 16:26, Tim Allen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> Sorry David but I agree with Jamie here - it's so obvious it hardly needs saying.
>>
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