Peter Riley wrote:

> re Gare du Nord's questionnaires---
>
> I think if you just ask people why they write poetry you'll end up with an
> encyclopaedia (an interesting one, as the first response shows).
>
> I'd be more interested in asking people why they read it, but that too is
> perhaps too vast an invitation. Asking people who don't write poetry (if
> there are any ) why they read it would slim it down a lot.
>
> Something more specific is needed. There are certain "concerns" around
> among the general left consensus of the poetry world, which call for direct
> messages to the world (stop slaying rhinos / punish Pinochet / rescue the
> ozone layer..... and many much more complicated issues) which demand a
> language use completely different from poetry's. Whenever they arise on
> the groups (as the latest appeal concerning Chile) I'm struck as by a sort
> of intrusion, that we are asked to use language as persons do, not as
> poets do. But people carry these concerns into their poetry and into their
> reading of other people's poetry.
>
> I'd like to know why. I'd like to find out why people turn to poetry in
> connection with matters which it is obvious prose can deal with far more
> efficiently. I'm operating a working assumption here that what i call
> "prose" conveys messages (mainly meanings and directives) directly from
> source A to receptor B and that "poetry" does something quite different.
> That poetry seeks its messages from what the author doesn't know and
> transmits them in a wholeness of occasion from which the receptor gets them
> as things enmeshed with their moment. That a drama rather an an instruction
> is transmitted. Or that concerned messages are and must be clear and
> positive, whereas poetry is committed to a holism which seeks to incorprate
> the contraries into its discourse, the negatives and wrong meanings turning
> themselves back onto the author as authenticities.
>
> Is there than a way of asking (here or in Paris) what use people find in
> this ill-defined medium with regard perhaps to specific matters of world
> concern, so as to spark a discussion not of the concern in its own terms,
> but of poetry's entanglement with it?
>
> There is actually the possibility of such a thread on the PoetrEtc list,
> arising from some questions I wrote to Coral Hull and her questioning
> response. Well I thought it would, but no one has taken it up. (Though I've
> been in Budapest tapping my feet so may have missed something). I do find
> that poetry persons world-wide are generally unwilling to talk about
> anything which is not classified as currently acceptable poet-talk, such as
> the terms of "Language" poetry or electronic screens.
>
> //PR

The question "why I write" poetry or "why I read poetry" may be too wide -- as
Peter suggests. Yet, maybe, as rephrased away from the "I" it may work -- i.e.
as formulated long ago by Hölderlin it may give rise to interesting thinking :

Wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?

Why poets in a hollow age?


Pierre
--
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Pierre Joris
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Through the living the road of the dead
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