[David Mason]

I'll be away from my desk from Sept 15 to October 6, so if anyone wants to try a topic on me, now's the time to do it.

[Janet Kenny]

Dave you wrote:
I'll be away from my desk from Sept 15 to October 6, so if anyone wants to try a topic on me, now's the time to do it.

Since everyone already seems to be away from their desks here's a curly one.

We are now in a global society we are told. In the past, poetry has been used to tell our own stories.
For a lot of people the attraction of poetry is just that. Now we post across cultures. Often I am asked to insert a sort of tourist-guide to my poems.

I maintain that we must allow the differences and make the effort to find out the parts we miss through vernacular and cultural differences. On forums we can ask the poet but I don't think we have a right to expect the poet to insert explanations into the poem itself.

We all read Shakespeare from a distance. I read almost all literature from a distance and greatly relish the special regional and personal elements of the writing.

I'll be honest. This is partly caused by the fact that although Australians see and understand American films with the voices of the original American actors, some of our best actors are dubbed when Australian movies are shown in America. Unless this is permitted the distributors often reject the film.

I find the same expectations often are voiced if I refer to something outside familiar experience or vernacular in a poem. I am frequently advised to change my poem so that everyone can understand it. The words "target audience" have been used. It doesn't seem to be understood that people who do understand the references would find the alterations crass and over explanatory and obvious.

I believe our worlds are similar enough for the difference to be enjoyed.

Janet

[Carol Taylor]

Janet, let me insert a quick point about the target audience. Sometimes a word may have a quite different meaning in another part of the world, so the reader may misread and go off track rather than have to look the word up or consider the context. I'm thinking of the phrase "a good screw."

Carol

[Tom Jardine]

Janet,

You're such a sweet bipolar. Why not suggest a movie forum? We have an art forum, why not a movie forum. I'd like to see what the poetical intelligencia watches.

I just enjoyed the Australian movie "Japanese Story"


Dave,

What do you think of William Logan?

Do you think formalism will stay? (Lines with rhyming words at the end? Meter? Is formalism a blip? Will it stand side by side free verse?

How many poems do you write/finish a year?

I am simply amazed how poets are published, and then the only thing you can read is "blurbs" about them. I've yet to be convinced to fork over cash on a blurb. Getting a book manufactured is nothing. Poets can't depend on networking to sell books--enough--sure, a little. Why don't more poets get their poems on the web? Get websites? It is not expensive. Is there an attitude that they think the books won't sell if people can get it for free?

What is the cause of poets writing a poem and totally missing an obvious mistake, not just spelling and grammar, (but those too) but conceptual de-railments--and then when it is pointed out--they see it instantly? How should a poet double-check their writing?

Is Tom Jardine a bore, or what? (Don't answer that)

TJ

[David Mason]

Janet,
I think some part of reading is always encountering the foreign, isn't it--the idiom not only of another country, even an English-speaking one, but also of another mind, another whole set of experiences. Faulkner can be almost as strange to a Northerner in America as he might be to an Australian. I've just gone through page proofs of the excerpt of Ludlow that will appear in the fall Hudson, and have noticed the editor's queries about specific mining slang that I have chosen not to footnote. Most Americans will not know that "bony" can be a synonym for "slag." But it was important to me to use the term actually used by people in this place rather than the more convenient and familiar word, and trust my readers to figure it out from the context over time. One of my characters is also from Ayrshire, where my wife was born and raised, and I've tried to catch his dialect without straining spelling, but mostly in grammar and a few choice vocabulary words like "scunnered," one of my very favorite Scottish words. So my hope is that American readers will find something rather exotic in the diction of my poem, and that the exoticism will contribute to a richness of reading. We shall see.

I do very much believe in using the local color of language all you can.

[David Mason]

What do I think of William Logan? A brilliant and courageous critic who has at times made me very angry (in some of his criticisms of Wilbur and Hecht, for example) and has more often given me uncanny pleasure (saying of Edna St. Vincent Millay that she was "Olds before her time," for example). I've read most of Logan's poetry and must say that I often found it verbally acute but emotionally cold. More recently I seem to be finding a greater number of poems I can warm to.

How many poems do I write in a year? I have no idea. I write more than I publish, and I publish more than I end up putting in books. My last book took me eight years to assemble and contains 34 poems. Damned if I know what that means.

Do I think formalism will stay? Well, it has been around for roughly three thousand years, so yes, if poetry stays, formalism will stay (if by formalism we mean meter, that is). It might be true that the poetry of the slam scene is usually no good, but my students, wishing to be respected when they perform, often come to realize that aural effects like meter and rhyme are useful to them. Where six years ago students would disparage formal attributes, they're now begging me to teach them more forms. The new aural culture means that you've got to have a good sense of timing and you might as well play with sound.



[This message has been edited by David Mason (edited September 06, 2004).]

[Steven Schroeder]

Dave:

Your mention of footnoting brings up a minor question that is nonetheless interesting to me: how do you approach footnoting a poem? Where do you cut off what a reader is either (A) likely to understand or (B) able to figure out from context, and if something doesn't fit into one of those categories, do you always footnote it? I generally try to avoid footnotes as much as possible, as I sort of get the feeling that a lot of readers will be insulted if I use them much, but at the same time I know of at least one instance in my poetry where a footnote was the difference between one good reader saying "I'm not sure I understand this" and "Wow, I like this." Go figure.

Also, on the topic of Slam, I think it's a good thing as long as you don't call it "Slam Poetry" since it's not poetry. It's a performance art combining equal parts of poetry, rap, and storytelling, and as such I think it's a pretty neat idea and a good way of making the arts appealing to generally good, smart people who might not seek it out by themselves. The problems start when people think Slam matches up well as written poetry with work by even a decent poet.

------------------
Steve Schroeder

[Janet Kenny]

David,
Thank you for taking my question seriously. I do agree with your answer.
As a child in New Zealand I read Mark Twain with enormous pleasure. It is the local words that give life to something real.
gratefully,
Janet


Carol,
and we had to learn not to say "fanny"
Ah--I see that Americans use it as we Antipodeans do. It's the Brits who blanch.
Janet


Tom,
as Dave more or less said, poetry is wider than poetry.
Janet

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited September 06, 2004).]

[oliver murray]

Regarding what Carol says above, in reply to Janet, we also have to take into account that usages change over time, and when this happens in another country we may be unaware of it. I remember the expression Carol mentions, "a good screw" in Dublin when I was a kid and it meant then exactly what it did in James Joyce's story "The Boarding House" - a well-paid job, but by the early nineteen sixties, if not earlier, nobody would have used it this way for obvious reasons.

I don't think the issue of local usage need cause us too much anxiety, or no more than any other issue of word choice does, and most of us write, perhaps, with more local audiences in mind, even though we may subject our work to the more widely based scrutiny of Eratosphere. I agree, though, that strident objections to a word or phrase because the critic hasn't heard it used in his own back yard should not be taken too seriously.

I also think that coming on local words, expressions and idioms are one of the delights of reading.

[David Mason]

Steve,
I'm wary of using "Written poetry" as the gold standard because I'm one of those who has actually heard the last vestiges of an oral poetry, the Miroloyia, or songs of mourning, sung spontaneously in fifteen-syllable lines in southern Greece, and it occurs to me that our definitions of poetry can't only have to do with what we consider "good" poetry.


As to footnotes in general, having just footnoted two massive anthologies of poetry, I'm rather tired of them, yet I can't read much Shakepeare without them, not to mention a lot of Scots poetry, so I'd guess they have their place. I rather think we should minimize their use until they're absolutely necessary. How one defines absolutely necessary I have no idea.



[This message has been edited by David Mason (edited September 07, 2004).]