>From a perhaps marginally different angle (non-marginal, relatively): I
recently attended a reading here at Harvard, organised by the Grolier Book
Shop and held in a University auditorium.  The place held about two
hundred people and was packed tight.  2 or 3 bucks each, memory elapsed.
People stood (some hunched or squatted) in the aisles.  The audience
seemed to me quite heterogenous, certainly not limited to those equipped
with vested curiosities or any sentiments bordering on anxious obligation,
largely multiracial (this perhaps in part due to the more various
constitution of peoples over here and to some extent at this University),
equally female/male, fans and mere idle considerers (such as, in this
case, myself).  Atmospherically, well, at least a good few furlongs from
anything I've attended in Cambridge (Rempress) or at say the Tate.  Much
reciprocal lauding, devalued-superlative effusion, prompts to buy books,
and literal "thank God for poetry".  This was an -extremely- successful
reading, in the least extremely engaging sense, in that a kind of default
airy contentedness hung and stifled the echoes of dropped coins, those
crouched in blank adulation were blankly congratulated on their supposed
commitment to poet-pervasion in having turned up, most left having
amplified their laughter where expected and hell maybe even having bought
themselves a snatch of something pithy.  Rented maybe, whatever.  The
readings were feeble atrocities, brightened by that excruciatingly
oblivious knowingness that got the writers their paperbacks in the first
place, scattered with offhand metaphoric Holocaust/picking my bum mergers
in full and accurate expectation of reflex mass sympathy, tiresomely long,
eradicably indigestible.  People whooped and hollered as if confronted at
long last with a -nineties- sage, one not afraid boldly to fuse poetry
with hatred for the narcissisms of the impecunious, to go where no man's
gone before without being well paid or at least lapped up and pasted over
the New Yorker.  The thing is, as I see it (at least partly blinded by
grief), this reading - wholly accessible and indeed accessed, utterly non
esoteric - was in fact much more exclusive than the tiny and perhaps
rebarbative gatherings I've been to in Cambridge.  Here goes for a
hopelessly circular recasting of "exclusive": what I was excluded from,
and what (in plain confidence) I imagine just about everyone to have been
excluded from (if not with the same wearying upstartishness that my
account's doused in), is -any form of overt or meaningfully
obfuscated honesty whatsoever-. Of course, of course, a kind of honesty
was manifest - fun was had, prices displayed correctly, minds so to speak
spoken with unabashed directness - but (and here Morality lurches in from
the wing) there was no provocative or in any way intellectually
substantive correlation between words and their setting, sentiment and
temporary society, all as if Brecht were merely a credential rather than a
durable concern.  A kind of mini, seemingly spontaneous Oscar evening:
delight and appreciation being thoughtful only inasmuch as they were
politeness.  Not to have applauded, not to have displayed due vigour and
responsiveness, would have been (so it seemed) embarassing; this is a
formal obeisance that more intimately alienating readings (perhaps
accidentally) do not require.  Ok, so even at smaller affairs it may seem
incumbent to congratulate, to maintain a least level of sympathetic
enthusiasm, but this is more often than not a personal response, motivated
by a sense of personal relatedness or shared circumstance; this, too, is a
restricting experience, but one in which useful critical distance
(whichever order of repressed squeamishness) is nonetheless implicit.  Now
most people who think about poetry a lot, and for whom that thinking is
also a staked -caring-, would of course preserve such a critical distance,
or even as I did find it extended when at these larger and
exaltation-oriented meetings; but I couldn't help feeling that the dynamic
involved in such a reading's success - its capacity to generate
'sufficient' interest in the first place - is in practice just too often
(I almost typed inevitably, whoa there) an amplified tacit appeal to
crowds of a different sort.  Geez, sounds like I'm suggesting there are
"undesirables".  Not at all - interest is free range, occasionally, and
can satisfy or dissatisfy itself wherever it chooses, of course; the kind
of reading I like is not the kind everyone likes and nor should it be.
But I cannot be so presumptuous as to assume that the kinds of poetry and
readings that I like, or that I dislike but would attend with something
other than a polemical sense of purpose, are not actually more -important-
than those which I and I reckon -we- (who?) dislike, strenuously or
otherwise.  I am much in agreement with cris AND with Lawrence: anything
that can be identified as obstructive to wider and more various audiences,
is for that reason something to be changed and immediately; this isn't
something that will somehow sort itself out, that faith is deflated.  But
I do wonder to what extent efforts should be made to introduce
specifically proactive measures, to make extended appeals that are more
than simply the erasure of negative aspects and that are not inherently
expressive of the poetry's own situation, however that might be percieved.
For which reason, I'm not sure that it is reasonable (though I can't help
but empathise) simply to highlight the absence of certain or
uncertain potential, attractive qualities that might, if present, make
readings more accessible to a more diverse group of people (by which I
emphatically -do not- mean women or ethnic minorites, who are "diverse"
only according to the vantage which isn't either and which takes itself to
be the norm in terms other than mere statistics - surely both are "groups"
only by a distracting fiction, even if solidarity is a crucial means to
recognition, and both are of course just as interested in poetries and for
that reason similar to anyone else who might regularly attend (I think,
myself however not either)) without suggesting exactly what they might be.
I just think - and at the same time recognise my own relative naivety -
that poetry readings are important primarily because they hospitably
include poetry. And not as a form of popular education.  Perhaps this
isn't what anyone was suggesting.  I'm sure no-one feels that the meetings
should be politically didactic, and that the desire to include "different"
people, whatever that might mean precisely, is as much to learn from them
as to allow them to see what already happens; but whether this is
effectively achieved through gearing readings towards it, in terms of
marketing, choice of space, choice of readers etc, or whether such an
effort actually alters the intial purpose to its detriment, I'm not sure.
I don't imagine that anything SVP could or would do, would ever transform
it into the Grolier reading, not a chance.  But there are degrees.  


 - Reminds me of a reading I attended at the Nuyorican Cafe, NY, at which
Andrea Brady and I were the only white people.  Seemingly, nothing -
or nothing efficacious, at any rate - had been done to attempt to draw a
more ethnically diverse crowd.  Anyhow, the evening was engaging and
highly entertaining, the poets unlike any I had heard before, and the
atmosphere buzzing and effusive.  An important experience, for me, makes
me think: the absence, by and large, of people of other ethnic backgrounds
at readings I commonly attend, does not imply that those people aren't
elsewhere, having at least as interesting and productive times as our own,
and that WE are the ones whose insulated complaints leave US out in the
dark and pondering.  Of course, as much difference at any one reading as
is possible, is valuable; any kind of poetry apartheid is flatly
ludicrous.  But people do choose, and perhaps more wisely than we give
them credit for (at the Grolier reading, only three people walked out,
all African Americans). The danger in this line, in imagining snugly that
everyone's somewhere else and fine and dandy and getting along unaided, is
a real one; always to be recognised; but so, I'd say, is the opposite.                                         

Keston




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