Whom do I write for or to when I write a poem? Who's my audience?
The first sentence above offers a clue to an answer, if not the answer. I write for my teacher, specifically, my English teacher, more to the point, the teacher who taught me to write, and exactly, two women: my mother, at our kitchen table and Mrs. Stevens, at Hendry Park Elementary School in the early to late 1950s. I first wrote "Who do I write for . . ." but corrected myself to Standard English. Both these teachers sit on my shoulder, as far as grammar and usage are concerned, whenever I put pen to paper or fingertips to keyboard. I may not exactly write "to" them, but I certainly write with those ladies in mind--they are my grammar & usage audience and I want to please them, even now. They wield to this day a certain authority over me as a writer, and so, in a very real and intimate way, they constitute at least part of my writerly audience.
These questions also provoked some discussion at a recent Wednesdays@One salon. We finished early sharing and talking about our poems and one of us (Bennett) asked whom we're actually writing for when we write. I guess it was time for this discussion to be had.
The topic set us on a brief survey of the group and, as might be expected, the answers were various and not necessarily well thought through. (And why would the discussion be profound or even insightful? Whom we write for is a tough question to noodle.)
My reply was, typical for me, a bit knee-jerk: I write for me. I didn't really quite understand what I mean by that statement. Someone else offered that he writes for people who read poetry, that is, who come to a poem with certain expectations. That's not much more definitive than "I write for me," is it? Somebody else declared that she writes for or to specific people, as a dedicatory poem might address an individual. And one of our group tried this: I just make art, and don't think about audience.
We're all right, I think, to some degree, and it might be best to acknowledge that we all write in all these ways: to or for ourselves; to other poets and readers of poetry; to our wives and husbands and children and best friends and mentors and even enemies and others we think we know well enough to "message" in a poem; and to no one in particular, because we're making art.
But one thing I noted was that we continually framed our discussion from the writer's ("our own") point of view. And for good reason, as the question framed the discussion that way for us: for whom do I write?
At Wednesdays@One, we are both writers and readers, which is what Bennett was getting at with his original prompt. We spend the vast majority of our time coming at it from the writer's point of view, trying to understand the writer's "problems" and "solutions" that become a poem. I think Bennett was asking, What's the reader's role in the writing of a poem?
And so I offer this dialogue between myself as writer and myself as reader . . .
Myself as Writer (MAW): The last thing I think about when a poem begins to stir in me is who's going to read it, with the one exception being that when I write a poem for Wednesdays@One, I do consider my colleagues there, all of whom I know more or less well, as fellow writers with an abiding interest in poetry. And even then, when I feel grabbed by a poem, when I get into the flow of it, my connection to audience usually loosens considerably. I forget about them and fixate on the art and the process.
Myself as Reader (MAR): That's not uncommon. I have a similar experience when reading a poem, especially for the first time, even if it was written by an author whose work I know well. I become immediately absorbed in the unfolding of the poem's "story," line to line and even image to image. This is because every new poem is a self-contained discovery vehicle. I read the first line not knowing exactly what to expect in the line that follows, as far as content and reference are concerned, at least. That's the pleasure of reading a poem for the first time--discovering where it goes, how it gets there. That first line sets up a kind of expectation, to be sure, though.
MAW: Yes! And the same for the writer, at least for this writer. I write a line not necessarily knowing what the next line will be, and therefore where the poem goes. It's something of a discovery for me as well. Still, as I put down the second, third, fourth word of that opening line, that is, as the first line begins to take shape, possibilities for a second line begin to open up. This is a kind of expectation-building process by which possibilities turn into probabilities and probabilities into poetic necessities as I proceed toward that thing we call "poem."
MAR: How very Aristotelian!
MAW: Yes, I've read and reread The Poetics, my friend. But my point remains: audience, my Mom and Mrs. Stevens, so to speak, aren't listening in or reading over my shoulder. I'm not writing with them in mind, not in the beginning. I'm busy making art! But in a way, the poem or the making itself becomes my "audience." As the work progresses, it speaks back to me about what's working and what's not, about whether a rhyme should go at the end of the line, about whether the metaphor I just wrote is mixed and is that admissible IN THIS INSTANCE.
MAR: Aye, there's the rub--making art. Isn't it true that Art (in this case we should probably acknowledge Art with a capital A) is audience to every artist?
MAW: How do you mean?
MAR: Well, for one thing, you imply that your mother and your Mrs. Stevens are no longer there physically when you write to correct you, to grade your work and so on. It's established then that your audience is not "there" when you write, but you still are in some ways under their control.
MAW: A good teacher leaves her mark! Both have passed away, bless them, but not my memory of them.
MAR: Art isn't "there" either. To a writer of poetry, who is of course an artist, "the Art" of what he is about is vital, it is sacred and to be preserved. It is to be satisfied, upheld, remembered, understood. Known. Like an audience.
MAW: Or renounced, rejected, countered, undermined, innovated upon . . .
MAR: The other side of the one coin which we might as well call "audience" for our purposes here. Whenever you're making a poem, the whole history of making poems, across all cultures and civilizations, of the ART of that activity, puts some pressure on you that's like what an audience might do when you share a poem--only Art is an abstraction, not a person, just as your mother is now a memory, not flesh and blood.
MAW: And still exercising some degree of influence over the writerly decisions I make as I construct a text, to whit, a poem.
MAR: Your audience. And even if you're not thoroughly familiar with every predilection, expectation, demand, or interest on the part of your audience (you may not know Lucretius, for example, but you know that the Romans wrote a ton and a variety of poetry), you know that readers of poems read for song and that songs behave in certain ways; they read for meaning and insight, and that meaning and insight are delivered in certain ways through a poem. Even if you can't thoroughly articulate those ways. And this knowledge becomes, paradoxically, your audience, whom you're writing to and for.
MAW: Okay, that's acceptable, from a writer's point of view. (Though Mrs. Stevens might complain that you just ended a sentence with not one but two prepositions!) But how does that audience work? How do we look at this thing from your point of view as a reader?
MAR: We readers can make mistakes too! But when we read, especially when we read over or again, we are in a way doing archeology; we are reconstructing how the poem got written, where the writer made certain decisions and how (and where) the developing text demanded certain decisions; we are looking for clues that only this writer will provide us in a poem--we are looking for style.
MAW: You read for the making and not for the meaning? Really?
MAR: If by "meaning" you mean some paraphrase-able content, some other way of saying what the poet (i.e., the poem) just said, then you're not really reading a poem are you? You're reading the news of the day or a how-to manual or code. You're reading a lecture or a sermon or a history lesson or a memoir. But not a poem. Yes, you read for "the making," which is what we might call "art reading." A reading of a poem wants to get at what and how it shapes language into sound and image and feeling and thought. But that's a very technically sophisticated way to read a poem. It's true, writers of poems write not unconsciously for/to the reader who savors language and what can be done with it.
MAW: But you also read for the music, the pleasure of rhythm and repetition, isn't that right? You read for the emotion that you feel when you engage with a poem, and the thoughtfulness the poem engenders as you read.
MAR: These are what I'd call higher order reading styles (yes, there are reading styles just like there are writing styles) that depend on your ability to ask questions like, What is this poem making me feel right now? What is this image reminding me of about myself? And, of course, how well does this poem do these things, assuming I've experienced them before in other poems by this or other writers? We all read for a purpose, for enjoyment or edification, say. Some read for a living, like literary critics, book reviewers and scholars. Frankly, I've never had much respect for writers of poems who claim that they write "only for myself," despite what my alter ego said above during his W@1 discussion. Nor do I believe them quite. They are afraid of audience, they lack confidence, and so saying "I write for me" is a defensive ploy. But they write for an audience, always. I'm meandering now. Readers do that, you know.
MAW: Explain, please? To be afraid of an audience of readers but to write for or to them always?
MAR: The writer's audience is always a fiction. That's what my dissertation director argued in a famous essay of that title. His point was, since writing (art writing) occurs usually in solitude, you can't enjoy or suffer the immediacy of your Mrs. Stevens right at your elbow. And even if she's there at your elbow, you have to guess whether she's going to like that next line you write, or image or simile. You have to imagine it. So, in the isolation of the making, you create a Mrs. Stevens who thinks about and responds to only your writing and what you're writing. That's all you can do, really. But this is getting a little deep . . .
MAW: I'll say! I just want to write a poem!
MAR: The point of my dissertation director's claim, though, is that all writers require some kind of audience, even if they have to invent one, or they couldn't get a word down on paper. You writers of poetry never write just for yourselves; that's an intellectual impossibility. But your audience is always specified, highly characterized, sometimes even caricatured. Writers join workshops, go to retreats and seminars where they'll find other writers, like-minded writers, whom they can more easily imagine as readers. Writers seek out personal editors (Eliot and Yeats did so with Ezra Pound.) so they can establish expectations that can be written to. It's much easier to invent your audience when you have some degree of intimate knowledge of its members' expectations. The hardest thing--and I believe, the impossible thing--is to write solely for oneself; you might as well write in a vacuum.
MAW: How suffocating.
MAR: I think we've taken this as far as we can for an evening. Suffice it to say, you're never alone when you write a poem.
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