Words to the Wise: A E Stallings
I came across the following words on poetry from the most recent Poetry Daily prose feature:
'Writing for any audience is the wrong way to win one . . . Rather, a poet should be writing to an audience – one listener or many – the poet's own soul, or an ideal reader, or a nation.'I like drawing the distinction between for and to here. Although writing for an audience seems generous in some respects, it is perhaps more respectful to write to an audience. For me the distinction is in acknowledging that one doesn't necessarily know what a reader needs even when one has something to say to that reader -- real or imagined. There were quite a few quotes I'd like to think more about among Dennis O'Driscoll's "pickings and choosings", but doesn't it seem a little like Thomas Sayers Ellis' Quotes Community project (minus the black people)? Or is it just me?— A E Stallings, Poetry, April 2005
posted by Mendi Obadike at 3:17 AM
3 Comments:
Your comment reminds me of the recent Poets & Writers piece in which three New Orleans writers wrote about their post-Katrina writing. The focus had the unfortunate effect of emphasizing their lives as selectively isolated writers over the life of the city, the lives lost, and issues of race and poverty raised by the federal and local post-Katrina response. Where were the African American voices, the Native American and Vietnamese immigrant voices, and poor whites? You'd think that none of them were published writing folks. Paralleling your query, I was left wondering if these writers, with one exception (the one who didn't evacuate), felt that their Katrina-subsequent writing was "to" or "for" a particular audience or reader, and who that might be. Or was it mainly "for" their reawakened writer-selves?
To me the distinction between to and for is this: writing for an audience implies that you are attempting to satisfy that audience's point of view, reinforcing how they think about things; writing to an audience implies having a point of view you wish to share with a particular audience, presenting something for them to think about. I'm not sure I know which of these I do - probably both. I imagine we all do both for time to time. I wonder what significance there is in finding what those times are.
You know, if I am honest I am sometimes writing for an audience, but I think in those moments I am clear that that audience is (or will be) present. After reading your points, Rey, I think what Stallings is thinking not just about reinforcing how a real audience might think about things, but also how about writing the thing that will draw that audience. Writing X so that Y readers will come to your work. I do think that after a traumatic event, like Katrina and its aftermath, how a writer might think of writing "for" an audience might be very different than when there isn't necessarily a shared experience among the readers. I have to think about this more, though, because when does an experience become shared? When you live in the same city? When you went through the same things? When you come from the same class, ethnicity, language group?
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