Questioning Audience in "New American Poets": A Public Space

In his intro to some "New American Poets" in Issue 11 of A Public Space, Stephen Burt asks, "When we ask how to connect a poem to an idea about poetry in general, we are also asking about an implied author, and about her implied audience. For whom, and to whom, does each poet write?"

It's good to hear Burt contextualizing his usually-perceptive questions about speaker with regard to audience. For about forty years now, poets and critics have built bodies of work on ideas about "speaker" (whether slippery or stable). It seems to me that this focus on speaker has overshadowed more urgent rhetorical issues, and that it has also run parallel to the overshadowing of the commons in practically every other arena (from the privatization of the amount of carbon in the sky to the privatization of the human genome). It makes sense that our (poems'; poets') civic antennae would be eroded in an era like this one; it makes sense, now, that we might want to rehabilitate them.

Burt begins with the seemingly solid fact that "good poems try to be as unlike one another as possible," and "We do not want poems to be wholly like one another—we take an interest in how they diverge—for the same reasons that we do not want our friends, our acquaintances, to be too much alike" (78). But what if this quest for "being-unlike" (rather than being-differently-with/within) mirrors all too perfectly the 'consumer choice' ideology of the 90's and 2000's? Are these poems offering, in fact, very similar choices, marketed (like brands) under the banner of individualistic difference?

In light of their "imagined audience," it seems to me that the representative poems are still, somehow, VERY akin to each other. Not wanting poems to be "wholly" like one another seems a world away from saying that "good poems try to be as unlike one another as possible." And like or unlike each other in what ways?

If the even "very good" poems in this selection produce difference at the levels Burt identifies—what fundamental sameness might be going unnoticed? (Not whether the poet eats toast or oatmeal or nasi goreng for breakfast, but whether the poem, for the reader, is toast, or oatmeal, or nasi goreng?)

What would great poems do?


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Burt is absolutely right to suggest that, if the poem "works as an individual poem, it will at once prompt, and frustrate, the best answers we can give."

But what if the poem wants to work, not as an individual poem, but as part of a kind of commons?

In other words: what are the questions?