when all other lines of communication are overloaded (1)

... Anything worth knowing passes from one man to one man. The book is still a viable way of communicating, provided one has taught oneself to find the book one needs to read. It isn't easy. All the electronic media are a flood of noise. And no medium can replace what may be an essential need in the poet: an audience. Homer recited his poems to people who cheered and even gave prizes; at least they passed around wine. Chaucer read his poems in warm firelit rooms. Every line of Shakespeare was written to move a paying audience. The next time you read a slack, obscure, convoluted poem, reflect that it was written in an age when printing has replaced recitation, and that the poet cannot tell his good poems from his bad except by fortuituous criticism.


Guy Davenport, in "Introduction" to Jonathan Williams, An Ear in Bartram's Tree (New York: New Directions, 1969), n.p.

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Davenport further suggests that the clarity of poems to the ear and the inner eye is to be tested in the classical weather of poetry - listening faces - and that the reading public is but a "charming fiction".

Couldn't agree more and it is from here that I derive my sense of responsibility as audience to poetry, to music: to be a totally responsive listening face, body and soul, accepting the invitation extended to me as well as my active part in the making of the work of art.

Now, more than ever, when all other channels of communication are blasted away, cluttered with unbearable noise.