on audience

In the Academy, we're told and taught to write for a particular but broad audience. But I think we've gone astray in these ideals. A friend was kind enough to gift me an Audible audiobook of Billy Collins and Garrison Keillor "dueling" at the 92nd Street Y, a place I'm awed by now that I've been exposed to its existence. After the readings they did some question-and-answer, and amongst all that they described the nature of poetry and doled out advice as it was asked for. Keillor at one point was describing how "the poems that matter to me are the poems that speak to me," rather than those which are tangled in language or belabored by extensive showmanship. He goes on to make distinct "a choice between honesty and some kind of murky self-pity," justifying the use of humor in poetry. Collins follows with this remark:

When you're a young poet, you want to speak to the whole world. [But] I think you learn that the way to speak to the world is to speak to one person, and to speak intimately to one person, and then everyone can listen to that.

He (and others) have said similar things. It isn't that revolutionary. But when I was listening to this, standing at the bus stop in the dark and cold, I was struck with a bit of revelation. Because, I think you could easily replace the "young poet" with a "young scholar." What we write and how we write is often an attempt to scream out to people and get them to see the value in what we've done, studied, or implicated. Additionally, we often present ourselves in a way not only to be noticed, but appreciated for our worth in the community. For whatever reason, "worth" in academia is measured at face value sometimes by how many bylines your name is embedded within or by how many obscurities you can interweave into your writing. The postmodernists and the traditionalists (if they exist anywhere) all do it, the language wreaking of self-importance and an association with big, important, and necessarily hard-to-grasp ideas.

The poets' advice, though, to think more about the one person that will be reading and the intimate connection with them seems salient, even crucial. And it extends: There's the one person you talk to during a presentation, a class, or a laboratory. What we do in our professional community -- especially in education, damn it -- should mirror or at least sympathize with the mentality we're trying to promote in schools. We should be connecting with one another in interpersonal, rather than extrapersonal ways. At some point, the human condition isn't one that interacts with multiple others, but a singular other. We aren't a fireworks display or even a bouquet of flowers meant to get the crowds to "ooh" or sniff en masse. Instead, we should be more like the poets, the honest ones who can make us relate to the old man in the Chinese restaurant. If we, the assholes of the academy*, recognized this more often in our writing and scholarship and teaching, we'd be better off.

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*A great name for a punk rock band, I think.