No, people didn’t rush
to buy books.
I’d read a poem called ‘Not just a broken token song”. I hadn’t
had time to explain why I don’t like such songs but the poem is a light hearted
criticism of them.
So reading over,
standing at the table with the books for sale, doing the usual smile and greet. A man approaches the
table, stands directly in front of me, picks up a copy of the book, starts
thumbing through it.
“The word whore trips
off your tongue?” he said or asked. It was hard to tell.
I was too baffled by
this opening to do anything except gold fish impersonations.
“Yes, he says, still
thumbing through the book, I see you’ve used it again .”
I think I muttered
something about contexts.
“Well”, he says, “you’re
the poet”, and dropping (tossing?) the book back on the table, exits.
Leaving aside how rude such behaviour is, and
all the clever things I thought of saying
a week later, I’ve been
trying to imagine what he thought he was doing.
So let us assume he
was an educated, rational human being.
This was, after all, an event in an academic writing conference. He obviously objected to a word (ok,
that’s not entirely rational in my book but let’s run with it) and he felt
strongly enough to want to police his little patch and make his unhappiness
known. But there was no attempt to
enter into any kind of dialogue, no attempt on his part to explain what/why/; no effort at all to even make his point
clearly.
I was obviously not
worth the effort of an explanation. So exactly what I was supposed to do with his outrage remains
a mystery.
Leaving aside the
specific Incident, and all the clever things I thought of much later, it also seems
emblematic of a growing failure to read poem as poem. It’s an extreme version of the
“ideological reading”.
As a writer I choose
words in context, to produce an effect in context: I believe it is possible to give words to a character to
signal that this character is speaking and behaving in a way I am criticising. (This is exactly what’s happening in the
poem in question). I’m interested
by attitudes and opinions that aren’t mine and poems seems a
good place to explore them.
But if poem isn’t read
as poem, as something made, and the writer not given credit for the time and
thought that goes into its making, if the default reaction is to pick whatever seems
unacceptable without stopping to consider how the words are working, then
what’s the point of writing a poem and putting time into its construction?
There are people who
wonder at my lack of enthusiasm for publication…..
