Muse in the Machine: Essays on Poetry and the Anatomy of the Body Politic

An Audience

7 An Audience [T]he poetic audience, even among intellectuals, has largely vanished. —Christopher Clausen [T]here are three to four times as many books of poems published now as there were in 1940 . . . and the print-orders of books published by major publishers are five to ten times greater than they were. —Donald Hall T his begins, like so many things, with a mistake I made. In the fall of 1990, I was interviewed by a reporter from the Burlington (Vermont) Free Press who was writing a piece about plans for New England Review, the literary quarterly of which I had recently become the editor. We talked for a while about NER’s editorial policies and procedures—how many manuscripts arrived daily in the mail (fifty), how many ultimately saw print, all the usual questions. The conversation focused mainly on the pragmatics of our internal operations, so it is perhaps understandable that when she innocently asked, “And how many readers do you have?” I replied, with equal innocence, “Oh, there are only the two of us.” 8 The Muse in the Machine In the shocked silence that followed my answer, I had the obvious epiphany—that my interrogator had made a transition in her questioning that I had not followed. She meant, of course, for me to tell her the size of New England Review’s audience; I thought she wanted to know how many editors screened the incoming manuscripts . At the time, the momentary misunderstanding was first confusing , then comic. But in retrospect I realize that it is also instructive. The fact that the word reader applies equally to editor and audience is no accident; this sameness indicates a connection that sometimes gets lost in the shuffle when we talk about the complicated set of relationships among writer, reader, text, and editor. How must it have sounded, at first blush, to the friendly Free Press reporter—herself, of course, a writer, one immediately responsible to an editor and to a sizable readership—when my reply to her question turned out to be not merely two, a figure ridiculous enough in itself, but “only the two of us”? How often has it been said by critics and by the public at large—not to say by the sort of “hard-nosed professional writer” a reporter stereotypically is—that poetry and “literary ” fiction are highly rarefied enterprises, and that, for instance, poets write only for other poets? How much more shocking is the idea that a couple of editors out in the Vermont hinterland might be producing a hefty, handsome literary magazine for the consumption of “only the two of us”? How could we possibly justify our parasitic existence? The very idea is comic. And yet it remained true that New England Review’s relatively small circulation—twenty-five hundred or so at that point—was paltry by comparison even with that of the Burlington Free Press, just as sales of my last book of poems were paltry by comparison with the circulation of USA Today. And it is also true that, when I justified New England Review’s budget to the Middlebury College accountant, as every year I had to do, it became clear that the figure of twenty-five hundred sounded to him not so different from “only the two of us.” An Audience 9 “A readership cannot be judged simply on the basis of a number,” I find myself saying over and over. And I am correct every single time I say it. Yet the beat goes on. It is a familiar beat as monotonous as disco, and it says, “Who do you think you are, you poets, you fiction writers, you artists, you editors of lit mags, you parasites, you who produce no junk bonds and drive no BMWs? For whom do you write? For whom do you publish? Where’s the dividend?” We’ve heard all that, again and again. We’ve heard it from accountants , who are, it must be said, generally good and responsible people; we’ve heard it in a different key from the likes of Jesse Helms and Patrick Buchanan, whom I for one am not prepared to call good or responsible, but who make a difference when they say it. To those “of us” in the field, it grows tedious. But in all honesty we ought to remember that this sort of question does have...