Curtis Faville wrote a long response to a post I made a while back where I disagreed with him about the relative values of poetry as it occurs on the page vs. poetry as it occurs in a reading (or as it occurs in other situations, I suppose). It's what I'm tracking with the spoken vs read tag.
Ultimately, I suspect Curtis and I are going to have to agree to disagree. Curtis finds it disturbing "the idea that great, or good, poetry must be suitable for the audible voice", and I do too. But I also find disturbing the idea that great, or good, poetry must be suitable for the page; I find disturbing the idea that it must be suitable for contexts (of time, space, culture, audience, whatever) other than the one it is presented (or, even, appreciated) in. I find disturbing the idea that poetry has "inherent merit", although I like the slant rhyme of the phrase. I find disturbing the idea that poetry needs to be boiled down to an essential mode of production, that anything other than "one person producing a text" should be brushed away, should not "amount to very much in the last analysis"; I find disturbing the idea that there should be a last analysis, that this analysis, the analysis that a reader is engaging in on this interaction with some poetry, is somehow always already deficient, not matching up to a teleologically driven last analysis. And Curtis doesn't seem disturbed by any of this.
I also find disturbing throwing around a phrase like "the greatest writers of the 20th Century", which seems riddled with many problematic assumptions as to what greatness is, how it should be universal, how it should be lasting (and point towards that last eschaton of analysis?), and how its effects must be documentable, and...well, anyway, that's a different issue, perhaps for another day.
No, not a werewolf. I was a person who attended poetry readings.
Maryrose alerted me to a very nice post on Mark Wallace's blog about how nice poetry readings are, how they allow poetry communities and poetry-based relationships to flourish, and how keen this whole world is.
Curtis Faville responded in the comments with some concerns about such "poetry communities" and how the performative nature of a poetry reading says nothing about the quality of poetry on the page, which he seems to equate with the quality of poetry.
Now, resigning myself to the role of poetry blogger, I'm going to use this opportunity to reply to both of them, first to suggest that Faville is a bit off in his sense that the page is the proper home of poetry, and to bear witness to my own experiences with poetry communities.
1. The page is not the ultimate arbiter of poeminess. That is limiting and ahistorical. It denies the poemy effectiveness of language when spoken. It is a giant "fuck you" to sound poetry. It insists that poetry is not for now but for the ages. But, as someone who lives now and not in the ages, I could hardly care what the ages or those who live in the ages think. Their poemic concerns are, by and large, none of my business. They are a wildly unpredictable bunch, who never return my e-mails. I'll let them work out poeminess on their own; they won't decide what I get poemy goodness from.
2. The performative nature of the page is indeed different from the performative nature of the reading, and one doesn't necessarily translate into the other. I think I just mentioned this.
Now, on to my experience as a teenager who, unlike Wallace, had access to poetry readings. Then we'll get back to this. (We will, today, ignore the role of the internet.)
When I was 19ish and growing up in New York City I started going to poetry readings. For a while I went fairly regularly to readings at the Ear Inn. Perhaps some of you reading this also were going to readings there then. Do you remember me? At the time I looked something like the guy on the left, the taller one:
No, you probably don't remember me. I found going to these poetry readings mostly an alienating experience, mostly (with a few exceptions) filled with endless encounters with unwelcoming careerists, whom I had nothing to offer. I was a quiet, awkward teenager. I had little to offer for a careerist poem. Even the poetry zine I was publishing was more interested in what people who didn't consider themselves poets wrote than "real" poets. I was largely superfluous to the scene. No one seemed to be talking about things I was interested in talking about anyways -- no one was talking shop, certainly, and if they had it probably would have been a very different type of shop than what I was interested in.
So I had access to a poetry scene as a teenager, and found it to be fairly disgusting and off-putting. It was nice to see some of the poets whose work I enjoyed read, and it made me feel connected to moderately famous people, but these connections were fairly ephemeral and certainly were nothing like what Mark Wallace is talking about.
And then I moved to Portland, where there wasn't a poetry scene (of the sort of poetry I was interested in, anyways). A handful of (generally non-careerist) poets got together (read: were organized by David Abel) and started up a scene, and it's doing well now, and now I finding myself agreeing with Wallace's assessment, that the interaction of interesting people is one of the main draws of "being a poet". I'd even go further, and suggest that some of the most interesting poetic moments happen in those or out of those interactions -- or, at least, it's been important to me. (See: Frank O'Hara: The Poetics of Coterie by Lytle Shaw, and eventually there will be a link to a pdf for The Redundancies here.)
So now I've lived in a place with a dysfunctional (for my needs) poetry scene, and one with a functional poetry scene (for my needs), and I'm about to move to a third city, and I am, frankly, a bit worried that I won't have a functional poetry scene in this new city. Which is to say, that I won't have poetry in this new city. In that sense. And what will I have to do about it, or what will I be able to do about it.
3. Which makes Faville's reaction -- of withdrawal, of burying one's head in the page, and declaring it to be the true place of poetry -- seem all the more tempting; it is safer, more controllable. Hell, we can all agree, is other people. But I'm not ready to give up on the possibilities and the poetics of human interaction yet.