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POETRYETC  August 2011

POETRYETC August 2011

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Subject:

Re: Young people on the list?

From:

Lawrence Upton <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Poetryetc: poetry and poetics

Date:

Sat, 13 Aug 2011 11:47:24 +0100

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (87 lines)

Dear Uche,

It suggests lots of things; but they may be wrong! i don't even know how
many people are here, how many listmembers - I could look; but then comes
interpretation. That's someone else's responsibility. I strongly suspect
that the majority are in silence.

It would be healthy to have a wider variety of ages. We already have a
wide variety of poetic approaches.

Some younger poets might find it a frustrating atmosphere.

But then, as someone else has said of Suzi, they thought she was young
and, they say, she isn't that young. I thought she was young!

I don't think that we can engineer that influx of youth.

It may not be that deep but it has stuck with me, years ago Peter Riley
remarked somewhere that an audience is built person by person, one at a
time even. (This is now more me than him because I am having to make up
for the lost context, which I cannot even remember, which supplied some
meaning.)

I liked it in part because it seemed to rule out from being counted as
audience all those who buy a book because that's the one they have heard
of.

The last time Heaney published a book, or perhaps the one before, he is
not a poet I much follow, an acquaintance praised it, said how glad she
was to have bought it, the poems were all beautiful, all moving.... and on
and on.

I asked her to tell me of one; and she said she needed the book to quote,
and then made to get up, presumably to fetch the volume. I cut in and said
that I understood that, but, as an idle experiment, could she tell me
anything, no matter how misremembered, of the book. She could not.

This, as Arthur Dent said of something in Hitchhiker, is a meaning of
beauty or importance or of being moved with which I had previously been
unfamiliar.

Following on from *that and on the matter of beauty, I was told a while
back by a writing group for whom I read my own poems, that all my poems
are beautiful. I had picked the selection carefully and they were largely
of the far west of Britain; and not syntactically disjunctive. I realised
that, for them, it was a sine qua non, that I was discussing beauty. That
is, I was triggering thoughts of beauty rather than writing beautifully -
I doubt they tested for that.

So an audience is less, numerically, than a readership, though more
important. There are poets of whom I would say that I am an audience who
have published books I have yet to read or obtain to read. I shall.

I think if we do our public job well here, word may spread. I think many
do it well. When I have received here proposed revisions to my poems, they
are generally sympathetic to my methods; and they can therefore be
received usefully. (Too often, elsewhere, poets' comments to other poets
amount to: I know better than you.)

We all need to lurk now and then. I am on lists where I don't speak for
ages. I am just there because I want to know what's going on there. So I
don't want to be seen to be trying to drag anyone on to the dance floor.

On the other hand, it may be that there are people here, young or old, who
are - for want of a better phrase - selling themselves short by not
joining in.

You get more out of a meeting, and this is a meeting, albeit complexly
time-shifted, if you join in.

I see that, earlier, I misspelt _hear_ for _here_. I'm sorry. I wondered
why I have only cereal bars to eat until I go to the grocers. Now I know.
It was an unconscious self punishment

Ah well. I must work. I have books to go before I sleep.

L
-----
UNFRAMED GRAPHICS by Lawrence Upton
42 pages; A5 paperback; colour cover
Writers Forum 978 1 84254 277 4
wfuk.org.uk/blog
----
Lawrence Upton
Dept of Music
Goldsmiths, University of London

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