I’m very much in agreement with your last week’s post. I guess when writing I just hope that someone will read it – but who that person is I don’t really know. Of course you want there to be some form of engagement, otherwise it’s elliptical or solipsistic. So I always have an ‘audience’ in mind, but, as I say, their faces are obscure – as in a dream! Perhaps these ideas become clearer over time (or if people are actually reading your work!) Perhaps other people have a much clearer idea… and without needing a specific social cause/ coterie or such. What about you? It strikes me that poetry concerned with ecology ought to be trying to speak to everyone, somehow, anyway.
I suppose one of the problems with audience is that with most poetry which can broadly, vexedly, be termed ‘experimental’ or ‘progressive’ or something it seems likely that the audience is going to be almost solely other poets. This issue was dealt with rather grimly on the Poetry Foundation recently. Mind you, elsewhere they provide more detail about who is in fact reading the stuff, in America at least.
Basically I concur that you just can’t worry too much about it, but should try to keep some awareness. And absolutely to write with ‘the widest possible empathy’, as you say, is surely a noble aim, and the best thing we can do. And to write as clearly as possible, using just the right words to further one’s ends i.e. taking risks where you have to, and not hedging. All this sounds very obvious and Coleridge, but it’s never that simple.
In the quest of better elucidation and in order to swing things back more to our original discussion on ecopoetics I turned to something which had heartened me before: the final chapter of Jonathan Bate’s The Song of the Earth, entitled ‘What are poets for?’ He characterizes poets as sort of earth-links who can speak from/through/within the earth, at their best when not describing, not giving narratives, but ’saying’ the things that are – rather like the Sami tradition of Yoiking. He also offers us a way out of didacticism (as discussed before): ‘…Ecopoetics should begin not as a set of assumptions or proposals about particular environmental issues, but as a way of reflecting upon what it might mean to dwell with the earth. Ecopoetics must first concern itself with consciousness.’
The argument is complex but the poet is seen as ‘the guardian, the treasurer, the primary maker of language’. The role is crucial, and the societal space is both necessary and allotted; poets are ‘imagination-workers’. This is a big job, and its takes me back to what I said in the first instalment of this conversation that it will a ‘failure of the imagination’ that scuppers us as much as anything.
But in the course of all this it’s occurred to me again that the vast majority of poets are naturally and unavoidably amateurs – in the etymological sense, and in the sense of being non-professional. This puts us in a very privileged position: we can say anything. But with that realisation comes huge responsibility of course.