Lawrence,
Sure. That all makes sense. Thanks.
--Uche
On Sat, Aug 13, 2011 at 4:47 AM, Lawrence Upton <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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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