who's your audience?

Great question, Peter, and one that perhaps we don't often consider closely. If I'm candid about it, I'd have to say I don't really have a good answer.

Since I haven't subbed in years, I'd have to say that most of my writing is simply to improve my skills. But that's a pretty sterile exercise. At some point, I'll have to try to get my work into the public eye. This also may explain why I've written very little: there's nobody waiting for what I write, so what's the rush?

But I'm glad you asked the question, because it's forced me to be honest with myself.

I write for my best self. I like that guy okay. The rest of my selves I'm kinda back and forth on liking, to be kind about it, and I try to remind myself that I shouldn't care what they think.

If I'm hitting the mark with my best self, I figure it's because I'm not lying. I'm saying something authentic enough that other people will relate to it too. I don't know who they are, but I'd like to think they are nothing like each other. Yet they recognize something in what I wrote because it's true to something in them. Maybe they figure they could have written the exact same thing, but I just got to the words first.

That's how I have sometimes felt when reading powerful passages from some of my favorite authors -- that there was so little mediation between us that it was momentarily hard to tell who was the author and who was the reader, or whether the writing was already done.

I cannot imagine getting near that kind of communion if not writing for my best self.

Now I just have to figure out who he is. Over and over and over again.

I like the idea of writing for your best self, whatever that may be.

As I'm just starting to learn the art, at the moment I worry less about writing for somebody so much as writing well and catching myself when I write poorly. It's something to think about though.

My audience:

. . . a little green man in my head
And he said, "you're not goin' crazy, you're just a bit sad
'Cause there's a man in ya, gnawin' ya, tearin' ya into two."

http://www.lyricstime.com/the-kinks-destroyer-lyrics.html

I completely agree with Blarg.

I always write poetry with only the intent of expressing myself as accurately as possible. Secondly comes the hope that someone else somewhere can relate. I'm kind of confessional in the fact that I write poetry therapeutically. I'm sure I could get better results faster by concerning myself with an audience but I find when I produce work like that it's often gutless and unsatisfying.

I really liked this question. It made me think a lot about the possible motives behind my favorite poets and behind my own work.

Known people who write just to write. Have a friend who writes volumes every year. Has no intention letting other people read most of them. Seems crazy to me. When I write I want the world to read it. He writes more in a year than I've written in 30 odd years. Always been streaky like that. Might go years without writing much. Usually more due to depression, though.

I suppose I fall into a different sub-genre than most, being mainly a slam poet, but I try to write for everybody.

That's what my preferred form is all about.

Avergae Joe, less than Average Joe, poets, etc. An audience is comprised of lots of different people and that's why I like slam; you can write an amazing poem that only an academic will understand, but so what? I've always felt the point of writing is to touch people, and if you're only touching a few, why bother? Slam allows me to be more diverse in my writing. There's "lines for Bubba" as we call them and there's hidden nuggets for a select few who will understand them.

Most of all, though, I write for myself. Poetry is very much a means of stability for me.

rami said:

I suppose I fall into a different sub-genre than most, being mainly a slam poet, but I try to write for everybody.

That's what my preferred form is all about.

Avergae Joe, less than Average Joe, poets, etc. An audience is comprised of lots of different people and that's why I like slam; you can write an amazing poem that only an academic will understand, but so what? I've always felt the point of writing is to touch people, and if you're only touching a few, why bother? Slam allows me to be more diverse in my writing. There's "lines for Bubba" as we call them and there's hidden nuggets for a select few who will understand them.

Most of all, though, I write for myself. Poetry is very much a means of stability for me.

Click to expand...

Exactly!

What is the point of writing something nobody else can understand?

One may just as well use a pin to randomly select words from a page to produce what is essentially - gibberish and twaddle.

Agree. Being confined to an ever-more rarefied elite has been poetry's path in the last century. I hope it takes a different one in this century. Because the last one came within a hair of killing it.