Readers Real and Ideal [by Katha Pollitt]

 I love the Gertrude Stein quip David Comiskey posted in response to my last blog: “I write for myself and strangers.”  that just about covers it, doesn’t it?  Another reader sent in a  different version: “I write for myself and strange people.” That’s probably  just as true.   For some more portraits of the reader in one’s head, I queried members of  WOM-PO, a listserv of mostly poets (both sexes) devoted to discussion of poetry by women.   Here are some answers: Emily Dickinson,  YOU, “the me which is that feathered thing alive and barnacled on/as my soul,”  “people who need my words,”   a friend in Colorado with whom the poet has exchanged a weekly poem for the past 33 (!) years, “my former next-door neighbor, Joan, who didn't go to college, but who is a terrific reader,” a  longstanding poetry critique group,  a local poetry listserv in Sebastopol, CA. Linda Rodriguez  says she writes for “a literate, reading person somewhere out there in the world, someone curious who wants to see beneath the surface of life” -- a version of Virginia Woolf's Common Reader --  but others longed to reach people, including their relatives,  who didn’t read poetry and who might be electrified by something they wrote. “When I find a fifteen year old girl in a small town somewhere that has read a poem and gone on to the library filled with questions,” writes Sina Queyras,  “Well, that’s what it’s about for me.” If that doesn’t happen, don’t lose heart.  As Kate Bernadette Benedict points out “My internalized reader may not even be born yet!”  

  Mary Oliver  agrees with Benedict.   “I write poems for a stranger who will be born in some distant country hundreds of years from now,”  she wrote in “A Poetry Handbook.” Of course, Oliver is  one of the most popular poets  in America right this minute -- it’s not like she’s waiting for posterity to catch up with her.   Billy Collins,  the other most popular  poet,   has a  riff on Oliver.  It’s a funny poem, but I can’t decide if he’s making fun of her.  Is he mocking her somewhat vatic claim on posterity, debunking the idea of posterity as anything special, ruefully deflating the concept of universality, or even comparing  Oliver’s poetry to a wet dog?  What do you think?

To a Stranger Born in Some Distant Country Hundreds of Years from Now

           

       I write poems for a stranger who will be born in some distant country hundreds of years from now. - Mary Oliver

Nobody here likes a wet dog.

No one wants anything to do with a dog

that is wet from being out in the rain

or retrieving a stick from a lake.

Look how she wanders around the crowded pub tonight

going from one person to another

hoping for a pat on the head, a rub behind the ears,

something that could be given with one hand

without even wrinkling the conversation.

But everyone pushes her away,

some with a knee, others with the sole of a boot.

Even the children, who don’t realize she is wet

until they go to pet her,

push her away

then wipe their hands on their clothes.

And whenever she heads toward me,

I show her my palm, and she turns aside.

O stranger of the future!

O inconceivable being!

whatever the shape of your house,

however you scoot from place to place,

no matter how strange and colorless the clothes you may wear,

I bet nobody there likes a wet dog either.

I bet everyone in your pub,

even the children, pushes her away.

 -- Billy Collins

Comments

[Margo Berdeshevsky]

Katha I'd venture that if Mr. Collins sees the future as a wet dog, as he seems to in this poem, it is he--who has no faith in the future. I don't think either poet, Collins or Oliver are particularly vatic, though. Both wander usually in the mundane & quotidian now.
best,
Margo

[terence winch]

Dear KP:

At some point, all of our readers will be from the future, and Collins is right---they'll probably bear a close resemblance to the people of our present. I wonder if there's enough out there for an anthology of poems addressed to posterity. I've always liked the poem that leads off Ted Berrigan's book Nothing for You:

People of the Future

People of the future
while you are reading these poems, remember
you didn't write them,
I did.

[Margo Berdeshevsky]

English 101;
"I don't think either poet, Collins or Oliver IS particularly vatic, though"

shame-brained-rapid-fingered, but solid, :(
m.

[Ellen Moody]

I think he's making fun of her. It's unkind.

Ellen

[Ellen Moody]

A little more: I've gotten myself a book by Carol Ann Duffy called "Answering Back," and it reminds me of this Billy Collins poem. They are not so bad, but simiarly most are sarky "ripostes" to the original famous poem, often soul-withering, accusing the original of being posturing or phony or in an unmerited emotionalism. A few presented an alternative world view, but it was interesting to me for the most part the "answer back" consisted of optimistic in the face of the original; that was not once the way of "answering poems." If you read Collins's poem The "in" way to be today is ever guarded and performative. Alas, I'm not surprized he sells. When I read it, I thought of Jane Austen's plea in _Northanger Abbey_, only in her case those denigrating novels had not gone into the content and inner spirit of such books to ridicule them.

E.M.