Who do we write for?

I was saying pompously to someone last night that I don't want to be the kind of poet who only writes for other "poetry professionals," that I want my poems to appeal to and reach people who are "normal." And that's all well and good, except for a few problems, in particular that no one other than professional poetry types really reads contemporary poetry at all. Maybe a few poems in general interest magazines, but beyond that . . . probably even the Billy Collins books that people buy don't actually get read. Even literary types--even fiction writers--say they're intimidated by poetry and don't know how to read it, or that they think it's boring and stupid and "dead" (depending on what kind of people they are). So there's little point in declaring a populist strategy. Poetry is obviously not dead, but it's obviously not a mass movement either.

Or at least not as we write it. Democracy is a weird thing with the arts, and with writing especially, since anyone literate can do it. As many people have pointed out, poetry is flourishing, it's just that most of it wouldn't be poetry the way I define it.

My mom (Hi, Mom) is a professional musician and composer of contemporary music (a discipline totally plagued by definitional issues--not "classical music," technically, but in some ways that term best communicates the information). When we're talking about popular music, she always says it's not music, it's something else. And I decided that what she means by that is that there's no drama in the music in a popular song; there are no events; nothing happens. Nothing's at stake in the ways the different musical parts relate to each other. That's not an indictment, I don't think, just a straightforward statement of how the form works. But to my mom, that drama, that possiblity of change, is the essence of the form, so without it what's left is not music. I feel the same way about "bad" poetry. As Joe says, "if surfing is so great, go surf," because it's not a poem unless there are mixed feelings creating tension and movement. But there are many, many people who love something they call poetry that doesn't adhere to this definition at all, that celebrates unilateral states of mind, and these readers are therefore probably not that interested in the dense little nuggets of introspection that I try to eke out.

I've had the same conversation a few times with different poets about the bigger roles poets play in countries wtih oppressive governments. There's always a tendency to envy those poets: the access to important subject matter that doesn't require self-loathing, and the ability to speak for and unite a people looking for a voice (and, of course, the absence of the mass media that everyone, including poets, gets really distracted by).

No American poet is going to have a cheering stadium full of people at every reading. I don't think I'd want that anyway, or rather, I don't think I could be that poet. But the other day, I was thinking about the middle ground between the cheering stadium and the audience of professionals who are basically only checking out the magazine to see if they want to send their own stuff there. The funny thing is that we all, before we become scheming, jaded professionals, are ordinary people. The line between reader and potential writer is always going to be impossible to define, and that's the amazing thing about a literate society. But rather than writing for the small coterie of connected careerists, we can write for the lonely teenager reading late at night, discovering something that speaks to potentials she doesn't know how to categorize or define. I remember my early days reading poems, and sure, they made me want to write, but also to live, and go on a bus ride with a moose, and wear my trousers rolled, and sitting well in order strike the sounding furrows. It certainly had nothing to do with hoping Jorie Graham would blurb my book. I miss those days, but I like writing for that teenager.