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Dana Gioia thus described the current state of poets. As promised, responses to my glib but earnest query—does the audience make the art form?
I was surprised and heartened by these cris de cœur, for all the good, wrenching, soulful, necessary nothing that poetry makes happen. Below, some thoughts on how or whether poetry survives, within and without the valley of its own making…
“Yes, it matters that someone reads me.  While it may be the uns
ayable that I’m ultimately after, the fact that I can actually connect with another human being through these frail words means a great deal to me.  But it’s not why I write.  I write because it’s the way I’ve learned to engage with things, to respond to all the mysteries.  If the sum of poetry readers in the world were suddenly wiped out, I’d still write; I’d miss them, of course, but it wouldn’t stop me from wading into the language and getting thoroughly soaked.â€Â ~  Barry Dempster
“I can’t speak for anyone else, but I care. I wouldn’t publish if I didn’t.â€Â   ~ Karen Solie
“Oh yes, I think we care passionately about having an audience.  Maybe we’d all secretly like to be read widely, but for most poets that’s not going to happen, so we cultivate indifference, or at least try to have a thick skin when we give a reading and five people show up. If we don’t care about an audience, who are we talking to, and more importantly, why are we ‘talking’ at all? I’m happy to have a few intelligent, responsive readers scattered across the country—readers whom I’ve never met.†~ Liz Philips
“I’ve turned my attention almost completely away from poetry and the poetry scene and have been concentrating for the last year on the political world. Maybe one day I’ll get back to the noble art but meanwhile it strikes me as something of a frivolity. The world is coming apart around us and I just can’t in good conscience continue to live inside the iridescent bubble of the poem or the mosh pit of the poetry community, which makes so little happen. Auden was almost right. And besides, the hundred thousand and more immediate readers I hit with every article strikes me as an improvement on the six people who read my poetry anyway. I miss the strenuous comfort of writing poetry, but there it is.†~ David Solway
“I think we all write in a bit of a vacuum and are surprised that anyone reads our work. It’s always rewarding, even moving, when someone seems to have.†~ Anonymous Canadian Poet
“Of course we do. Poetry is a form of communication. Not everyone may understand a particular poem, not everyone will want to even read that poem, but my goal as a poet is for my poems is to connect with readers / listeners. People turn to poetry, music and other forms of the arts during key times for solace, inspiration, understanding—in death, marriage, at times of crisis. The words of Karl Paulnack in his address given to a freshman class at the Boston Conservatory apply both to music and poetry.†~ Fiona Lam
“I do care that my poems are read—at least read by those who read with attention, appreciation, and some fellow-feeling.  …  Just this morning I received an e-mail from [reviewer] John [Herbert Cunningham], telling me how much he enjoyed reading my first book and writing This has had the effect on me of bringing that book back to life, a book I was beginning to dismiss as nothing more than my juvenilia, a rattle I cut my teeth on.†~ Ruth Roach Pierson
“For several years in the late 90s when I was working on my PhD thesis, I didn’t send poems out to periodicals. I was still writing, but truly for those years, my readership didn’t go beyond my workshop group. That was it. Nowadays, and since my first book was published in 2002, I seem to assume that only people I know read me. So it’s always a great shock to have strangers come up and comment on some aspect of one of my books. A joy, but a shock. People read poetry. People I don’t know read me. How terribly unexpected. It shouldn’t be, but it is. So, I don’t equate quality with readership. I write the best poems I can, and hopefully they will find a home in print some day. Even if they don’t, they’re still the best poems I knew how to write when I wrote them.
Success is a bit more vexed. It depends on how you define it: is success making a living as a poet? Being accepted into the community (the “tribe” as Shelley put it) of poets? Being hired to teach creative writing? Having a book out, or 10 pieces published (that is to say, being eligible for Canada Council funding)? Being able to hold your own in a conversation about poetics? There’s external success, measured by all those things listed above. And there’s internal success; writing poems as well as you can. Of course, I woul say that the latter is more important than the former. But of course, the former has a material and conceptual influence on the latter. It’s nice to be well-regarded by your peers. It’s nice to get some income, some publication to reinforce this unrealist activity of writing poetry. It’s nice. But it isn’t necessary.†~ Kathy Mac
“Of course I care if anyone reads (or listens to) the work. It is before an audience that the work comes into its full being or is fully realized, and without the audience it is a dormant thing. Writing to me is in part about participating in a collective community and so readers or listeners are crucial. How can thought be exchanged without them? Though I am not overly concerned about numbers, about how many readers the work has, because I do think that each person is a whole world and to affect one person is extraordinarily powerful.â€Â ~ Oana Avasilichioaei
“Years ago I read an interview with Sharon Thesen in the Malahat, in which she said that the audience for each poet might be something like 50 people (I’m really badly paraphrasing here)—most of them friends, other poets & a handful of academics. At the time, I thought that sounded about right, but now I’m not so sure.  Seems like poetry readers are mushrooming all over the place. I don’t believe that we write only for ourselves.  If that were the case, we wouldn’t need to put it on paper but could instead just stare at it in our minds & congratulate ourselves on our brilliance & have another glass of
sherry. When it comes down to it, I think that I do care if anyone reads me, but I’m only writing to one person at a time. I only worry about one person at a time—that seems to be the only way poetry really works for me, on a one-to-one basis. So I worry about you reading me.  And I worry about my students reading me.  And so on & so on to the power of Breck shampoo. But I can only think of it as one person at a time, reading one poem at a time.â€Â ~ Mitch Parry
“Of course I care if I’m read, and yet when I’m writing, I can’t care. Lately I’ve been caring, and that’s been getting in the way. When I suspend those concerns and write what comes, I generate a lot of dreck but also leave open the possibility of surprising myself. Caring about the reader, if it happens at all, happens for me well before I sit down to write (as I ask myself, How can I write something I haven’t written before, something that won’t bore or merely satisfy those who know my work), and / or at the revision stage. I feel that I’ve been writing more interesting poems, poems that are more true to who I am, that are more urgent, that are less interested in impressing and more interested in exploring. There is, clearly, a price to be paid for that: poems written with, however subtly, an intention of impressing may actually do that, and if they do, that sells books. But if I really wanted to sell books, I wouldn’t be writing poetry. I’m writing poetry because it helps me to understand the world and myself—it’s how I think and feel—and if others, through listening in, better understand the world and themselves, that’s all for the good. When I’m honest with myself, I must admit that if I hadn’t had any publishing success early on, I would probably not be writing now. At certain points in one’s life, it seems essential to have a connection with readers acknowledged. Short answer: yes, I care, but I don’t care, beyond a certain point, how many people read me. Would I have any time to write at all if I were read by millions?†~Stephanie Bolster
“My ambivalent answer: no and yes. Some reasons for no: when I start a poem, I’m doing it because I have something I want to explore, say, discuss through language, form, rhythm—every poem is like a little private experiment. I could experiment indefinitely without the prospect of publication. Some reasons for yes: after you write some of these things, there is something to be said for putting them out someplace where they’ll
have readers. Having readers can create a movement around poems that doesn’t exist if the pieces don’t have an audience.  I don’t think this sort of discussion and movement determines the ‘poetic quality’ of a piece.  But maybe it opens up more potential for a poem as a mode of discussion.
I’d write even if I knew everything I was going to write in my lifetime was going to end up in a big pile in the corner of my office and never see the light of day.  But I’d probably rather have some readers, at least for some of my work.†~ Holly Luhning
“It matters a lot if nobody reads us, and I’d suspect any poets who say otherwise of lying through their teeth. It should trouble us, frankly. Here’s a comparison: classical music is often regarded as elitist, unpopular, etc., but I’d wager that a single orchestral concert at Roy Thomson Hall or Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier packs in more people than the number who buy the best-selling collection of poems published in Canada each year. Yet the act of poetry is incomplete unless and until a poem reaches, touches, moves other people. I think a lack of readers has some subtle as well as some obvious effects—e.g., far too much weight ends up getting placed on awards and reviews because, in the absence of readers, they appear to offer both justification and power.â€Â ~ Mark Abley
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That night at Mitzi’s Sister, this argument, which ma-ay have been well-watered, stumbled around accessibility. The accessibility of poetry is separate from concerns of its marketability—how many people poetry is reaching—but the two get smushed together, as if a batch of easy-peasy poems would suddenly go all CSI. (Will this question, which arises from a capitalist, market- and readership-based quantified evaluation of art, fade as this recession slows us down to fondue parties and reading E.E. Cummings to each other when we can’t afford the cable bill?)
iting it, though this is a rant for another time). Have the tools overtaken the creation?
