RSS
Home
Accessibility, audience, from two directions
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
July/August issue
Nice surprise: Two magazines that I use as writing tools, Poets & Writers magazine and Poetry magazine, each one a combined July/August issue, arrived in the mail in mid-June, giving me a head start on reading both, as well as a quickie Examiner piece on two of my favorite topics:accessibility in poetry and audience.
The issue of Poetry is not yet posted online, but the Poets & Writers issue is already available here.
Within the first pages of each, my issues are addressed by deflection: with a letter to the editor in P&W (watch this space for a future piece on Poetry's letters to the editor) and in the first three poems published in Poetry, by Tony Hoagland.
The first Hoagland poem, "At the Galleria Shopping Mall," disappointed me because the poet turned an everyday experience, a trip with his nine-year-old niece to a Texas mall, into a wail about being lonely and being an American. In the second poem, "Personal," however, I found Hoagland delightfully turning a list of cliches, as if drawn from country-music lyrics, into a defiant chant in favor of life and living.
Hoagland is an award-winning poet who lives and teaches in Houston (sourcing his Texas influences), and who has been published and recognized relatively recently, despite his 56 years. He has been praised for his humor in poetry, and a light touch, and both qualities are evident in the three poems of his that Poetry uses to open its summer volume.
Both Hoagland's humor and touch contribute to the poet's wide-open accessibility and a reach for an audience beyond the borders of academia.
The letter to the editor of Poets & Writers mag comes from T.R. Hummer, also a poet, and is excerpted from a comment Hummer posted on the P&W website. In it, Hummer notes he has been the editor of several literary journals and that he believes "online publication — perhaps especially for poetry — [is] an unstoppable force."
If you've enjoyed some of the pieces I've written here on Examiner, you probably would agree with Hummer. Online may be the future testing ground for publication in print, which makes sense since the expense of putting words online is far less than printing words on paper. P&W's use of a portion of Hummer's online comment is as good an example as any of the trend.
"We don't yet have iPoems. but we may in the future," Hummer writes.
When you think about what Hummer is saying, you realize he's talking about accessibility and audience, and poetry's reach to a wider crowd.
Related Articles:
Add a Comment
