Ah, I getcha. If you had said "a literature", I might have followed.
I think I'm rather with Paz, that it's _criticism_ that produces a literature, because it's criticism that makes connections and tracks genealogies and (ideally) produces the conversation that weaves different writings into relationship with one another and into relationship with a readership. A specialist kind of reading, perhaps, that produces its own texts and needs it own readers. Maybe that's merely obvious. I fear I am often merely obvious...
All the same, there are currently some pretty fierce territorial face-offs happening between "traditional" "professional" critics and the bright new blogosphere, which is probably pertinent in an oblique way to how something as volatile as readership (and the culture of reading) is changing. Perhaps you could identify some of your problems, and potentially solutions, in that area, although that's a different kind of question to the problems of publishing poetry and certainly sideways to the question of business. Not unconnected though.
All best
A
On 5/10/07, Chris Hamilton-Emery <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Alison, I don't think writers produce literature I think they produce
writing (there are a lot of writers producing a lot of texts). Literature I
think is best understood a product of readership. I've written on this as
coherently as I could at the time in a blog entry on the Salt site. You candiffer
certainly consider a writer's output as literature in potentia, but I don't
think it's sensible to say everyone who writes is producing literature,
perhaps that needs a capital L. Literature, surely, has something to do with
being read; more to do with being read, than producing texts?
--
Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com