"Whom do you write your poems for?" [by Katha Pollitt]

It’s easy to describe the readers I  have in mind when I write my column in The Nation:  the 185,000 Nation subscribers, who are mostly liberals, progressives and leftists  of various sorts,  college-educated, over thirty, up on the news.  I know quite a few of these readers, and hear from them all the time.  Beyond the magic subscription circle, there’s the larger community of feminists, other journalists, and writers I admire including a few dead ones in my head. 

 

   But whom do I write my poems for?  “Anyone who wants them” is one easy answer. “Myself” is another. Both are true in a way, but incomplete.  Who is that “anyone” who pockets the breadcrumbs I cast upon the water?  And if I write for myself, why do I  try to publish my poems and care what anyone thinks about them? At least for me, communication is intrinsic to writing, so I must have some blurry idea in mind about who I’m communicating with -- or, perhaps more accurately, given the state of poetry these days,  wish I was communicating with.

 

  There’s a sociological answer to the readership question. According to  The Poetry Foundation’s  survey, “Poetry in America,”  the most frequent readers of poetry (or, as the study oddly calls them, “users” of poetry)  are middle-aged women with post-secondary degrees, who began reading, or using, poetry when they were young.  That’s me all over!   Sociologically,  “I write for myself” and “I write for anyone who wants it” are not such different statements after all.

 

   But what about the ideal reader?  The one who really sees what you are trying to do in a poem, and if you can please that demanding but simpatico person, you  feel you’ve gotten it right? If you’re lucky, you might have a teacher like that when you’re young, or a  friend, or a fellow poet or two.  Failing that, or in addition to that,  you might have to imagine your ideal reader, as Dante for all intents and purposes imagined Beatrice, whom he’d had such a crush on when they were kids.

 

   One popular type of imaginary ideal reader is, curiously, the non-reader.  In “In My Craft or Sullen Art,”  Dylan Thomas claimed he wrote not for literary people or for the ages but for “the lovers,/their arms round the griefs of the ages,/who pay no praise nor wages/nor heed my craft or art.”  And indeed, if  those lovers disentwined themselves long enough to read a poem, it was probably one by Thomas,  one of the last poet-celebrities of the English-speaking world. 

 

   Yeats (right) was another one who envisioned an ideal non-reader. In l914, fed up with  the  ideologically overheated  Dublin literary-political scene, he imagined his ideal reader as a Connemara fisherman,  a “wise and simple man”  whom Yeats believed belonged to an older, better, truer, more organic (in the old sense) Irish people.  What saves “The Fisherman”  from nationalistic  sentimentality is Yeats’ admission that this ideal  fisherman-reader does not  exist. He is  a necessary fiction, a dream:

 

 

Although I can see him still.

The freckled man who goes

To a grey place on a hill

In grey Connemara clothes

At dawn to cast his flies,

It's long since I began

To call up to the eyes

This wise and simple man.

All day I'd looked in the face

What I had hoped 'twould be

To write for my own race

And the reality;

The living men that I hate,

The dead man that I loved,

The craven man in his seat,

The insolent unreproved,

And no knave brought to book

Who has won a drunken cheer,

The witty man and his joke

Aimed at the commonest ear,

The clever man who cries

The catch-cries of the clown,

The beating down of the wise

And great Art beaten down.

 

Maybe a twelvemonth since

Suddenly I began,

In scorn of this audience,

Imagining a man,

And his sun-freckled face,

And grey Connemara cloth,

Climbing up to a place

Where stone is dark under froth,

And the down-turn of his wrist

When the flies drop in the stream;

A man who does not exist,

A man who is but a dream;

And cried, 'Before I am old

I shall have written him one

poem maybe as cold

And passionate as the dawn.'

 

Comments

[Phoebe]

Hi Katha! the question of lyric audience is such an interesting one. I wonder if you've read Helen Vendler's Invisible Listeners, which considers the question of the real and fictive reader with respect to the poems of Herbert, Whitman, and John Ashbery. A slim little book but a potent one.

[Daniel Comiskey]

There's also Gertrude Stein's famous answer to the question: "I write for myself and strangers."

[DL]

Kudos: Yeats's poem, a favorite of mine, is a great answer to that compelling question. The criterion ("as cold and passionate as the dawn") is gorgeous if a little hard to pin down. Kenneth Koch liked quoting Valery: A poem is a communication from one who is not the author to one who is not the reader. A liberating thought, as is the related one that you need please only yourself when you write poetry (whereas with journalism you usually have an editor to please). When I wrote regularly for Newsweek, I got a kick out of knowing that theoretically a million people may have read a piece of mine on James Merrill, or spring training, or Barnes & Noble superstores, or murder mysteries. This took the pressure off my poetry, or so it felt. But I also think a lot of poets are needlessly defeatist in assuming that "no one" reads poetry, no one buys poetry, and that the situation is not susceptible of modification and change. "The Best American Poetry" doesn't sell a million copies, but it does sell thousands every year, and those are real readers, whose intensity of engagement with the subject dwarfs that of the average consumer with the beach blanket or coffee table book of the season.

[jim cummins]

I think Yeats also said (at the organizational meeting of the Rhymers Club? on the second floor of a restaurant? with poets literally hanging from the rafters?) something like, "The first thing we know about ourselves [poets] is that we are too many." This is from memory, so maybe I've botched it.
-- Ezra Pound