Thoughts on The Long Conversation
In class right now, we are discussing the idea of a continuum of writers, history as being a long conversation among us. Some questions: What is this “long conversation”? Who is consuming it, participating in it, and leading it? Who is left out? What is the purpose or intent, and what is the effect? How do you become a consumer, participant, and leader? What is your intent? What is your identity?
I see the long conversation, in part, as an ongoing, living document connecting various strains of writers together, like a big family tree. Some branches don’t ever meet each other, but they are all connected. This is to say that the writers are all connected somewhere along the line. I’m not so sure about the audience(s). When we ask, “Who is left out?”, a lot of the time I think that the very people we are writing to/for (supposedly) are the ones being left out of the conversation, or at least not invited. I think this is accidental – that we often aren’t aware that we are leaving them out. A lot of the time we just don’t know how to invite them in. Consumption is a good word for where the conversation stands now. It has become corporatized just like everything else (like Slouka was saying in his essay), into literary magazines, publishing houses, MFA programs, and summer writing conferences. Who consumes it? Writers and aspiring writers. Those who are already established feed into and perpetuate the system by returning to ‘pass it on’. This is, of course, what we want; however, as it appears to me, we’re only completing one-half of the conversation. We’re talking to ourselves—new generations of ourselves, but still talking to ourselves. We leave our programs and conferences, and continue to circulate among each other.
I am looking for ways to break the conversation out of its loop, to push it out into new arenas. How to begin doing this? Create a new vocabulary and new places to use it. There are a few people out there doing this. Jack Collom and Project Outreach at Naropa, and Kristin Prevallet and Bob Holman in NYC with Study Abroad on the Bowery are two examples of poets leading a very physical advancement of the conversation, albeit both projects are geared heavily toward classrooms. Leonard Schwartz’ radio show Cross-Cultural Poetics (http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/XCP.html) provides literal conversations among and with poets and writers all over the world, on important contemporary topics – though it is difficult to gauge just who is listening.
How do we interact/converse with people who are not students or other writers? There has to be a way to splice our creative endeavors with the Real World. I always feel uneasy separating poetry from the Real World, as something to be re-connected with it. But it is the sad truth.
