Norris at Dagzine responded to my last post, saying "Talking of readers not schooled in poetics and their potential reading experiences is at best guess-work and at worst a fetish exercise creating an object-place for an ideal class of people who do not exist in relation to a group of poetry-folk who supposedly do." I thought I'd let him know just why it's neither guesswork nor a fetish exercise.
I spent 7 years in graduate programs in English, but for the 4 years immediately after my BA (Spanish), and for the 21 years now since I left graduate school, I've lived in a very different world, where I've had almost no contact with other poets or with anyone who read poetry except by accident or on a greeting card or when I wouldn't shut up.
That naked poem is the one read by the eighth graders and the college freshman I taught, and by the framing carpenters, drummers, chemists, painters, tool-and-die-makers, sheetrockers, engineers, cashiers, middle-school teachers, programmers, cooks, and Chief Petty Officers I've worked with. It's the poem read by my banjo-playing Civil War history buff brother, who works on an assembly line but can certainly write a better sentence than "Whether a poem or poetics emerges as eruption or irruption that emergence is active going over or going under; such active writing does not betray a resistance." It's the poem read by my wife, a wonderfully intelligent and capable woman who went straight from high school into the Army, who can't spell but who trained horses, and who started as a bagger at her current company and now leads a team of 40 people.
And these people—my friends, students, colleagues, and family—expect from poets what they expect from any writer who asks for their time or money: to treat them with respect, to have something to say which is insightful, beautiful, amusing, moving, or better, all of that, and to say it as clearly as possible. What earthly justification is there for insulting them by doing less?
None but arrogance—the risible notion that poets have some privileged understanding of human society and the world. And that leads to real fetish exercises.
11:28:38 PM 
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