(The site password is poetry.)

Another option would be that of a kind of "guerilla poetry" where poetry is staged in unlikely places. While traveling in Bucharest, occasionally a young man would get on the metro for a few stops and recite a poem by Eminescu, afterward trying to solicit charity from the commuters. Why not gather a few poets together and--sans any previous publicity of the event--engage in a reading frenzy? This can take place in parks, around schools, outside gov't institutions, etc. At the very least, a few enterprising and curious citizens may ask us what we are doing, and why. Another option is the call and response variety where two poets on a bus can read to each other in a kind of "poetry in transit" style campaign. Instead of hosting readings in cloistered places, we could bring the poetry to the people. Wherever one goes, one may never know if poetry will be spoken in their space.

-Kane X. Faucher

How much does the audience matter to innovative poetry?

In every other Artform- Film, Painting, Fiction, Dance you name it there is an audience for the Avant Garde.

It seems however that in Poetry we are either too afraid to bring what we are doing to an educated interested audience?

Or the nature of the poet is one that cannot take the blows that being in the arena entails?

I think it is the latter. Look at so many of our Avant Garde poets and the way they

deal with audience.

Avant Garde poetry has a problem which other artforms don't and that is that many poets are too afraid to sell what they have and push their passion to a real audience.

Say what you will about bad Slam poetry but they are the ones on HBO they are not inviting Ron Silliman to read but they are there taking up babdwidth.

I think that we need to change what we do and move out of our comfort zone and engage.

Raymond Bianchi

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Ray, I can't help but wonder about the idea of taking the blows that you mention. If experimental/innovative poets take blows from people not used to innovative work, will that put pressure on the poets to make their work less dense, more absorptive, to use Bernstein's phrase.

I tend not to worry about a general audience while writing. Am I just being naive? Or am I recognized the situation of contemporary poetry?

If we are to expand our audience, how exactly can we do it? I think many innovative poets are willing to face an audience. Where do we find one outside of the poetry circles?

Bill

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The audience matters entirely to the performative aspect of innnovative poetry--performance poets, slam artists, and so on. This kind of electronic arena is performative, too, because public and nearly instantaneous, thus closer to speech than writing used to be, with its great delays in reception. But by "the audience," people generally mean the mass of literate citizens and the degree to which they might be attracted to poetry, if at all. The word innovative is code for difficult, postmodern, well-educated; Its audience is itself, an increasingly large demographic bearing into history our currently received notion (received from Mallarme, "Crisis in Poetry," 1895) of non-linear, intransitive, often verbless expression that gives glancing blows to its nouns.

Paul Hoover 12.18.06

Is the audience for innovative poetry other poets?

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I would say that "audience" matters more to innovative poetry than other types of poetry. In some sense the audience or reader helps create "meaning" in innovative poetry...I'm coming from the vantage point that there isn't any one particular inherent meaning to many innovative poems. The reader (or audience if the work is read aloud) completes the "art experience" even if we're not presupposing that art must have some aesthetic value. I still love the idea that the poem is sculpture carved in time. Repositioning the details of the world in another, new context reawakens the senses in the viewer. Art is more real than reality.

I almost began to write "sadly there isn't a large audience for what I consider to be good poetry" ... but at rock bottom I don't usually think much about who is or isn't "appreciating" poetry. I just know I have to keep making it. Literacy is relative...meaning that many "literate" U.S. citizens will still never have any appreciation or interest in poetry, not Dylan Thomas, Ron Silliman, Billy Collins, Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, Bill Allegrezza, Ray Bianchi, Simone Muench, or Larry Sawyer. It always means so much more when a well-respected friend says they like something I wrote ... there are no famous poets, only notorious ones. But I'll never understand how the majority of people on earth do not have the desire to read poetry, because it changed my life.

-Larry Sawyer

I tend to agree the audience for difficult poetry is itself, but I think some of Paul's other statements show a change is in progress. When he mentions writing electronically is much closer to speech, he's correct. Less distance exists between writing and "getting it out there." The same is true for poetry--instant gratification. I think the possibility for up-to-the-minute poetry anthologies in an online format can swing the audience by brining hyper-contemporary poetics into the classroom. I think the classroom is really the place where innovative/difficult find a means for being read. I've heard it argued difficult work is only difficult when it's new (Eliot and Pound usually are the examples). Now that we've a widely accepted means for interpreting Eliot's difficulty, he ceases to be difficult. The process of figuring out what's important enough to study and then studying it should be a much faster process as technology continues to advance. New won't be new for long.

-Steve Halle

The idea of interactive participation on the part of the audience is not exactly new, and does not necessarily come upon the wings of new forms of technologically-innovative poetic transmission (such as blogs). In fact, it is in theatre that we find a curiously parallel notion of titrating the audience into the production and dissemination of the poetic event, that of the "fourth wall" where the line between voyeur and viewed are blurred. The open space that merges the performer and the audience is akin to various experiments in the neo-Baroque where the audience equally become an essential installation of the work.

In participatory poetics, we find a murky line drawn from Aristotle's Rhetoric...In oratory, Aristotle speaks of the use of the enthymeme--or, the hidden premise in the argument that goes unspoken--as a means of eliciting this premise in the minds of the audience. It therefore emboldens the audience to believe that they are active participants, and that their reason is what gives solidity and substance to the oration. The unspoken is indeed the dark precursor to a different style of sense that the audience constructs alongside the poet or orator. In more "modern" sense, the Baroque innovation of the exquisite corpse survives as a late medieval tavern game where each participant adds a line to a poem that circulates, at the end of which it is read aloud to either the amusement or awe of all involved in having built a kind of collective poetic machine, a poetic plane of consistency composed of conceptual blocs.

Poetry slams are partially participatory, but perhaps frames the poetic event in terms of a combative contest, a kind of polite gladiatorial game of metred and unmetred conquest. A less combative gesture would be more akin to the sort of spontaneous poetics among the slaves of the South in the early 19th century which was based on a singing call and response. Could we construct a call and response poetry? Could we do so by simultaneously installing and dismantling the notion of a chorus?

-Kane X. Faucher

Well, it would seem that an audience for post-avant is hard to come by. We mostly read & write for other post-avant poets. This has its ups & downs-- we don't need to worry about an intrusive public making demands on our freedom, cause there is no public. We're free, we're not a commodity, it's unlikely that we'll become slaves. On the other hand, it's hard not to feel marginalized in a country that puts such value on commodification, quantification, and vulgar celebrity. I think even the most famous avantists really only write for a handful of people. Our approach to the issue of "audience" depends on what stance we take regarding "audience"-- do we want or need one? Is a large public really beneficial? I think you could make a valid argument that the best, most vibrant art usually happens in the margins (and often stays there.)Look at Keats, Shelley, Blake, Baudelaire, Poe, Cezanne, Van Gogh, all the way up to Jack Spicer-- all were margin-dwellers. I think that as long as we're creating art that brings pleasure & spiritual replenishment to ourselves & a few others, we'll be OK.

--Adam Fieled

I agree with Adam. Even more so, the idea of margin (as we become marginalia?) may in itself presuppose a center. But those nomadically distributing themselves along the peripheral margins may also be relative centers of intensity. But Adam raises a very good question about the desire and value of a large audience. Unless we are willing to try to construct a "people's poetry" that is universally inclusive, any such attempts will fall back into niche state anyhow. The worry is if such forms of poetic transmission do gain a wider popularity given what Adam invoked on commodification above; that is, the commercial apparatus cottons on to a blood scent of what is popular, surreptitiously absorbs it, repackages and markets it back as a flat image for consumption. I laud Adam once again for repositioning our own desire to create and transmit work: the enjoyment of it having value among ourselves with some recognition from our poetic peers.

-kane