I've enjoyed the Dare du Gord write-in slots, and so welcome Doug's call
for a few more questions. Here's a couple, which aren't meant to stop
anyone else having questions, and which are fairly capable of being bent
to anyone's specific needs. Feel free to answer to the list: if GdN likes
the results they may (with the poster's permission) recycle them:
1. Why? or perhaps What For? It's easy enough to avoid poetry in any of
its forms, from an early age, and even having met some, it's easy
enough to walk away. Thousands do. But people on this list have for some
reason or other stayed with it, either as net producer, net consumer or
service trade. Why you? Wonderful teacher at school? Deep moral inner
vision incapable of other expression? Wish to impress another for sexual
purposes (in which case how successful was it)? And subsequently, after
that initial hook, why stay with it? And finally, what would make you walk
away at some stage?
2. Community - odd or what? Poetry's generally a fairly solitary sport and
has its share of difficult individuals for sure, but I was surprised when
someone pointed out that of the poets interviewed in "Prospect Into
Breath" I was the *only one* to confess to some feeling of community (of
poets, readers, etc) around me as a writer - is this unusual doc? should
I get specialist help? Do other people imagine themselves part or not-part
of something, however nebulously expressed? This isn't about dis-agreement
(see below), it's about agreement, sense of kinship. We're talking lumping
taxonomy here, not splitting taxonomy.
I'm not too worried about the present list lull, which I don't think is so
much to do with dispute (implied sulking in several corners, which I don't
think's happening) as with having talked the last thing to a standstill
*for the present* - it may surface again when there's an occasion for it
to do so. And I don't think it's the case that we can't disagree (in fact,
a look through the archive will disprove that...). Anyone looking down the
list of listmembers will be aware that the differences - of method and
belief - encompassed in this gathering are so strong and fundamental that
it'd be hard to even get 'em to order a takeaway together in other
circumstances - but here we are, listening to each others' news and - to
be sure - putting in our pennyworth when it's seen as needed, and although
it's a contact sport, no-one gets permanently hurt. As in any
list/seminar/party, there are a few blurters and some lurkers, and some
who swing both ways...
RC
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