Friday
May092008
Collins Mix
Friday 9 May, 2008
'Q. You think poetry’s on the upswing?
A. Well, in some ways it is, indisputably. When I was poet laureate, one effect of occupying that office is that you get interviewed quite a bit, and the two most frequently asked questions were, one, how to do you account for the upswing in poetry, the rebirth of interest in it all across America, and the second question was, how come no one reads poetry anymore?
Q. So, there’s opposite sides of the same coin.
A. Well, I think the answer lies … There is a way, in a kind of paradoxical way, to answer both questions, which is to say that, yes, the audience for poetry is increasing, the number of reading venues and prizes and magazines and all poetic mechanisms are increasing, but—and this is not completely the case—but that the audience for poetry seems to be composed largely of people who want to write poetry. George Carlin, who’s one of my favorite word guys, he says, the thing about poetry is there’s a lot more people writing it then there are reading it. Yeah, well, I think there’s a great deal of truth to that, and I think there are certain poets out there who are breaking this kind of vicious circle, if you will, by bringing it into the audience of poetry non-practitioners, that is to say, people who have no vested interest. It’s like, if you have 600 people at the opera, probably 20 of them are fellow opera singers, but if you have 600 people at a poetry reading, it’s closer to 500 that are poets.'
Link
via Silliman's Blog
A. Well, in some ways it is, indisputably. When I was poet laureate, one effect of occupying that office is that you get interviewed quite a bit, and the two most frequently asked questions were, one, how to do you account for the upswing in poetry, the rebirth of interest in it all across America, and the second question was, how come no one reads poetry anymore?
Q. So, there’s opposite sides of the same coin.
A. Well, I think the answer lies … There is a way, in a kind of paradoxical way, to answer both questions, which is to say that, yes, the audience for poetry is increasing, the number of reading venues and prizes and magazines and all poetic mechanisms are increasing, but—and this is not completely the case—but that the audience for poetry seems to be composed largely of people who want to write poetry. George Carlin, who’s one of my favorite word guys, he says, the thing about poetry is there’s a lot more people writing it then there are reading it. Yeah, well, I think there’s a great deal of truth to that, and I think there are certain poets out there who are breaking this kind of vicious circle, if you will, by bringing it into the audience of poetry non-practitioners, that is to say, people who have no vested interest. It’s like, if you have 600 people at the opera, probably 20 of them are fellow opera singers, but if you have 600 people at a poetry reading, it’s closer to 500 that are poets.'
Link
via Silliman's Blog
Reader Comments (1)
Yeah, Billy Collins' answer shifts confusingly from talking about people who WANT to write poetry to people who DO write poetry (poets!).
I guess this depends on what your goals are as a poet. Whatever one might think about Collins' own work, there's no denying that he has made poetry 'accessible' through his poems. IMHO, this compromises change and development in order to reach the widest audience - packagable poetry which cannot possibly scare its readers away - being an easy-to-read 'word guy'. Now there's nothing wrong with accessibility, but I'm not so sure that its the mission of poetry to make itself desirable to those 'who have no vested interest'.
Collins' Opera example is a crap one. Opera singers devote their lives, from a very early age, to the physical training of their voices, a procedure which is a full-time job in itself. They are opera singers by profession, whereas most poets who aren't poet laureate must hold down full-time jobs as well as write their poems. It's hardly surprising, therefore, that your average opera performance isn't JUST attended opera singers, just as it probably isn't attended solely by rentboys, policemen, condom salesmen or postmen.