Hi Doug,
Thanks for your post. You say:
> The mainstream is a loose, baggy genre that one can choose to join if one
> wants that audience and those restrictions.
...
> I assure you, I have absolutely no animus against anyone choosing a genre or
> an audience. You choose and you set your work at risk to the future: that's
> the final catch.
Do you think it's possible to *avoid* doing this if you put your work into
the public domain at all? Do you think that alternative practice is somehow
avoiding the question of choosing its audience? (Or is it choosing a tighter
and more well-fitting rather than looser and baggier audience?) In his
book "The Intellectuals and the Masses", John Carey argues (or I take him
to) that modernism was in part a quasi-Nietzchean response to the emergence
of mass literacy, an effort by an intellectual elite formerly made separate
by its participation in written culture to preserve its discreteness. I
wonder if there are echoes of this in the mainstream v. alternative audience
debate?
You also say:
> But it [the "mainstream"] does
> have limitations. Thus, *judged in their own day* (note emphasis), Keats,
> Christina Rossetti, Tennyson, Edward Thomas, Eliot, Ted Hughes, and and
> Carol Anne Duffy may apply for mainstream funding; Dante (the 'Comedy'),
> Novalis, de Nerval, Pound, HD, Williams, Marianne Moore, Olson, Paul Celan,
> Lyn Hejinian probably can't until notably successful because their genres
> have to wait a while for recognition and, by and large, are more ambitious.
How do you define "ambitious"? Someone might have the ambition to destabilise
the way we think about language; someone else might have the ambition to
write an "excellent" (by their own metric) crown of sonnets. Does "ambition"
apply to the poems themselves, to the central and peripheral processes of
writing them, and/or to the intellectual constructs and intentions that the
writer puts around this process? Is (possibly radical) innovation a virtue
in itself, for its own sake? Perhaps I reckon all decent poems are in
some non-trivial sense acts of innovation, or it wouldn't be so bloody
difficult to write 'em :-)
Good heavens, I'm full of questions today.
Kona.
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