Where is our audience? Rather, where is mine? Every good writer is said to know where the audience lies, and who is in that audience, and how to write for them. The purpose of writing is then to communicate with that audience -- communicate information.

I admit that first paragraph is distilled from a discussion of the topic on the board at Desert Moon Review a year or two ago. I imagine the original has long since gone to rest in deepest cyber space, protecting me and all the rest who became involved in that discussion. Thus, I am relatively free to go on from here and demur on a number of points.

First of all, I do write for a living; actually I write mostly for speaking but also for pure reading material. By profession I am a minister: I write sermons and devotional literature, promotional material and news items, besides poems and quasi poems. Some of that stuff is meant to convey information; sermons and devotional material, however, are intended to create in the listener/reader some awareness of a vision of life ... not so much information as in-formation. Certainly, I need to be aware of the rough group of people who are likely to be in my audience insofar as the importance/necessity of avoiding technical language. I find, however, that effective writing more springs from the impetus in idea or incident than considers the "target audience."

While making no claim for value in sheer obscurity, I would like to consider of what the target audience of poems on the board of Desert Moon Review appears to consist. In several cases, the audience consists of those who will catch a crucial allusion (particularly historical or literary ones), without which the poem seems to say something alien to what is intended. In some cases, the audience consists of those who are capable of managing the implications of English grammar, without which a seemingly straightforward poem becomes incomprehensible gibberish. Occasionally, the audience is restrained to those who are willing to give a close reading to the internal consistency of the poem as presented. Often, sufficient material evolves in the poem itself to provide adequate ambiance for the emergence of the poetic dynamic intended in readers who do not panic at poetry. [I speak, I should say, of poems other than my own -- of the apparent audience whose identity emerges in the critical discussions that follow the posting of the poem.]

Often times, the interest appears to be in conveying distinct information, perhaps in cryptic form, but always with the influence that figurative language (image, metaphor, symbol) is there to dress up the discussion as opposed to create the arena for discussion or of the poem's milieu. Metaphor is treated as if it were univalent, at worst "oligovalent" (a few dimensions of meaning possible), but hardly 'polyvalent.'

In my own mind, my poems are written for me, to open the veiled nuances in experience - largely of people, but also of other animals and plants and things - so that I can see them better. Some people seem to like what I write this way, and they create of themselves a secondary audience among whom I find the poem becomes the poet in the medium of their souls, as the polysemous (generating many facets of meaning or productive nuance) structure of words and sentences and images and metaphors interacts with the complex matrices of experience and submerged memories to create meaning - often in harmony with what I had come to see, but not always. Sometimes I am surprised. In fact, those poems for which I have the least regard for audience seem to be the best accepted by others - itself a pleasing aspect of this habit of writing. Those metaphors which are not arbitrary, but imperative conveyers of development and insight within the poetic logic of the poem become the managers of thought - mine and that of the reader/listener alike.

Like most of such musings, these arise from a background of theoretical reading on the nature of language, some ripe disagreements with influential masters in the field and the idiosyncratic habits of reading and reflection on the poetry at hand - my own and that of others. I know no other means of approach than to extract observation from what I encounter, based on what others have suggested might be taken as a means for comprehending what is there to be understood.

And, as most such musings, these enter a public arena, to engage those who have their own idiosyncratic understandings of these matters. And I am hoping that another will wish to respond with an article length discussion or rebuttal or even confession of total aggravation with what I have thrown out for consideration.

Thank you.

Bill Flewelling