"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.'

 

from the archive; first posted August 4, 2009

Comments

[Andrei Codrescu]

"Who do you write for?" is not a good question. Why do you write poetry, or why does anybody publish poetry? are still feeble questions. The question is, "What is poetry?" To assume, as these questions do, that you know what is poetry, is hubris. Does an editor know what poetry is? Does a grant jury, including Pulitzer and Nobel, know what poetry is? They don't. They know the poets they heard about and they have read poets under duress, because the "culture" demands it, because it's their job to do so. Poets read poetry to figure out how to write poetry. The genre itself is an atavistic inheritance from a earlier age when language was divided by genre and countries had borders. Dictators are poetry's best friends: they enforce borders. The only (wobbly) claim for textual difference between "essays" and "philosophy" can be made for stories; they cover the whole page. "Poetry" leaves blank spaces on the margins, a gift to the nonexistent art of calligraphy. The plague of confessional text passing for "poetry" these days is a guide to the victimization of the first person singular, a footnote to political rhetoric. So why are so many young people writing this thing? Because it's easy, it carries a number of followers (like a tiny internet platform) and it can get you laid. And it keeps poetry schools in business. Why older poets keep writing it? They hope to find out what it is they are doing.

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