Poets or 'ports', portly poets. J

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> On 18 Dec 2017, at 12:18, Jamie McKendrick <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> Drew, I was referring to a post of yours some while back with a cartoon of Field Marshal the Common Reader before which poets are meant to present arms. It seemed to me a striking but not very recognisable image which assumed that poets (or certain ports)  are servile before a despotic set of expectations. I can't say this is a pressure I have ever felt and doubt anyone who takes the art seriously would pay any attention to it.  We must all have encountered readers who are hostile to what we write. I certainly have. We are free to listen to that hostility and see if there's any reasonable cause, or ignore it. Still, I have found the criticism of certain readers, now as when I began writing, invaluable. But this is something different from a more abstract notion of the Reader.
>    I'm interested in what you say about the reader here. I'll try to put down a few thoughts, though I doubt they'll be of much use to anyone, when I've finished some work that has to be in this evening.
> Jamie
> 
> 
>> On 17 Dec 2017, at 20:11, Drew Milne <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> 
>> 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.
>>>>