The Dancer and the Dance: A Book of Distinctions

Poetry And The Media

Poetry And The Media A speech delivered July 19, 2001 at the Sonoma Country Day School Teaching Poetry Conference The subject of today’s panel is “Poetry and the Media.” Such a title more or less dictates the subject matter of the response. In one corner, “poetry”—usually encountered in books but sometimes in live performances, in newspapers, or even on television or radio or in films. In the other corner, “the Media”—a term which usually refers to radio, television, and the press, sometimes to films, rarely to books. A panel on “Poetry and the Media” is likely to discuss the presence (or lack of presence) of poetry on the radio—as in Garrison Keillor’s recitations—or on television—as in Bob Holman’s series, The USA of Poetry or Bill Moyers’ The Language of Life—or in the newspapers—as in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s once intermittent column in The San Francisco Chronicle. Such a discussion would also touch on the Internet and on the “Slam” phenomenon. Generally speaking, the word “poetry” is avoided in the titles of television programs dealing with the subject; Bob Holman is to be congratulated for actually using the word in his title. The word poetry is understood by many to be a turn-off. In the film, Meet the Parents (1992), someone announces that the Robert de Niro character is going to read a “poem”: we know the horror that is coming! We could discuss whether poetry is “effectively presented” in these various media, or whether one particular medium presents it better than another. We might suggest that poetry is better suited to one medium than to another: might argue, for example, that it is more effectively presented in the aural world of radio than in the visual world of television—despite the fact that many people talk about a poem’s “images” and that world literature boasts an astonishing number of “concrete” or “visual” poems, a resource that has never been exploited by television or film. We could discuss in what manner the kinds of techniques used in presenting radio and television programs have affected poetry. Are our attention spans shorter than they used to be? (What is an “attention span”?) Do we now need “sound bytes” in our poetry? Is an aphorism a sound byte? How has the complex world of music, of popular song, affected poetry? 1 2 The Dancer and the Dance There is surely much to be said about all these subjects, but I intend to take a somewhat different tack. It seems to me that in postulating a subject like “Poetry and the Media,” we are already thinking of poetry as an aspect of a medium or media, so that the title of the panel should really be “Some Kinds of Media and Other Kinds of Media.” A poem always already exists in a medium—whether the medium is the page or the mouth of the poet or whatever. A poem of Larry Eigner’s was once inscribed on the outside wall of the UC Berkeley Art Museum: that was its medium. Indeed, poetry cannot exist without a medium: there is no ur-poem or archepoem which exists outside the condition of manifestation; and no poem is anything other than the manifestation of a medium. My friend Ivan Argüelles handwrote a poem in a spiral notebook while sitting in a UC Berkeley student hang-out called “Kip’s.” He then phoned me to ask what I thought of the poem. Later, he typed the poem onto a piece of white paper. Using that paper as a “score,” he recited the poem at a reading in Berkeley. He also sent “copies” by e-mail to various friends. Later still, he published the poem in a literary magazine. It may have appeared in an online magazine as well. Finally, it became part of a book, in which it would be read and perhaps memorized and recited by other people. Some of these people might like it enough to e-mail it to their friends. Each of these manifestations—spiral notebook, phone call, white paper, recitation, magazine, electronic publication, book—is separate and distinct from all the others. The version of the poem which appears in each of them is separate and distinct from all the others as well. But, surely, it may be objected, while these various media are all admittedly somewhat different from one another, they are all manifesting some thing—and that thing exists apart...