It's been a while...

since I bothered to write anything here and there's a lot on my mind. An interesting conversation on the PoetryEtc listserv about poetry and audience got me to ask a question about a writer's ethical responsibility to her or his audience, but I didn't actually propose an answer in my posts, and it's the answer that I am thinking about now--though it's hard not to think in platitudes and cliches about fidelity to language, to where the poem wants to go rather than where I want it to go, and so on. (And that's something else that I want to write about, the way some people on the list talk about the poem in a way that reifies it/animates it/anthropomorphizes it and how uncomfortable that makes me; there's a religiosity in that kind of rhetoric, a desire, I think, either to turn the poem into a god or into a kind of divine visitation from a god that ends up being more mystification than anything else.) And I find it frustrating that people on the list seem not to want to separate the notion that we all write for an audience, in the sense that we believe we have something to say that is worth people's attention, from the notion of writing for a particular audience, i.e., kids or experimental poets or whoever, because there are different kinds of responsibilities implied in each. To write for a specific audience, for whatever reason, implies, among other things, that you will write in a way that speaks to that audience, that what you have to say is meant for that audience--though others may choose, and you may invite them, to listen in--and so, for example, if your audience is experimental poets, you need to justify what you write in terms of what is understood by the word "experimental." In other words, you will make choices that will identify what you write as fitting that category. And now my son has just come in and interrupted my train of thought; besides it's time to give him breakfast. So I will post this and write more about it at another time.