The dream of an imaginary community that allows total identification with one’s role within it to an extent that rules out interiority or doubt, the fixity and clearness of an external image or cliche as opposed to ephemera of lived experience, a life as it looks from the outside.
—Stephen Murphy
I'm fine admitting this blog is more of a self-care action, in a lot of ways, it's me searching for a community to inhabit with my poetry... but this goes along with a lot of what I understand poetry does: self-care... those at the Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange were talking about how poetry can be written just for the writer, how it doesn't have to be for an audience... and those at the Hour after Happy Hour were talking about how there are "more poets than poetry readers." It's an odd central thing w/ poetry: it's easy to write a poem, but not exactly guaranteed to be enjoyable to listen to: it's a cliche that poetry is bad.
I'd like it if poetry was not bad. The central question of this blog is, how can poetry be [fun, punk, sexy, exciting == good]? Right now, in answering those questions, I'm hung up on communities. This is partially attributable to the lesson behind the quote above: I'm looking for the imaginary community that guarantees fun/punk/sexy/exciting poetry, along with commensurate fun/punk/sexy/exciting people. Think of the Beats, or the Modernist writers, or the popular image of artists in general; think of 'Midnight in Paris'.
As the quote suggests, though, this search for a perfect community is a trap. It is an attempt to displace personal pressures onto exterior social pressures; "someday I will find the right people for me."
I've been saying this repeatedly so I think I'll just come out and state that the purpose of this blog is not to "find the perfect community" but to learn as much about Pittsburgh's poetry communities as I can, for my own and for the reader's education. --poetryburgh@gmail.com
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