over 300 members on the list

I was thinking today about some MOAPG things. There are over 300 members of the list at this point in time. One of the mysteries of this sort of list is that there are hundreds of members, but only a handful of them actually participate. I guess many people are quietly reading the posts, and more than a few are simply deleting them as they come in. Maybe reading them once in a while in a whimsical sort of way.

I guess this because that's what I do with some of the lists that I belong to that I never contribute to. Occasionally something grabs my attention for a moment and I shoot off a comment. As those who know me might guess, it's usually a response to something that irritates me. I have to be careful though because I also have a tendency to get people stirred up to the point that they write backchannel emails to the group moderator and before I know it, I'm booted.

I teach communication skills, amongst other things, and one of the facts about people that I already knew was confirmed by "science" recently. People get mad when their basic beliefs are challenged; a fact confirmed by MRI scans that showed that the emotional parts of a human brain light up like a Christmas tree when a belief is challenged. So otherwise intelligent and rational people get angry.

It appears that people who write poetry are no exception to the phenomenon. In fact, because they have a better than average sensitivity to language, their trigger is much more easily tripped. Comments about their sense of poetry really set them off (just for the record, I'm human and get ticked off about all kinds of things). Hell, it may even be that creatives have lower insult thresholds than the general population.

I also teach English Comp courses, and almost none of the students get upset when I critique their essays, pointing out the organizational flaws, and the mechanical ones. But if they show me their poetry (which I try to avoid for obvious reasons), and I make similar comments about their craft, well, they get upset. That emotional flareup appears to be related to the perceived personal nature of poetry. Poetry, it is widely believed, is too personal to be commented upon in any way that is not complimentary because an attack on a poem is the equivalent of an attack on the person who wrote it.

I can't think of any other Art form where that is so. Something about the use of language to create Art makes the artist especially vulnerable to negative criticism. If I play music badly, which I often do, I don't like it when it's pointed out to me by others, but I certainly understand it, and the resultant emotion is more frustration than anger; frustration with the disparity between what I am trying to do and what I actually manage to do. Those anger spots don't seem to get triggered.

It may have something to with language; we all think we understand language well enough to communicate. But I'm guessing that it's more a matter of ignorance than anything else. Ignorance of what good poetry sounds like. We're exposed to music all the time, so we know what's possible, but poetry, well poetry is not something that people are exposed to much at all.
A little bit in school, the stray birthday card, church, or funeral maybe, but certainly not on TV, radio, or... anywhere much at all.

So we don't have any mental benchmarks for quality when it comes to poetry. If the only wine you ever tasted was something like Ripple or Boone Farm Apple wine, you probably don't have any idea what the possibilities of wine are. If the only poetry you've ever been exposed to is the stuff that's printed in some church bulletin, the Readers Digest, or a birthday card, well, you have no idea what poetry can be.

Most people don't like to think of themselves as ignorant. They lash out at those who make them realize that they are. I think there's a tendency to want to believe that we're all born perfect, and that what we know is the true essence of knowledge. I used to lash out at T.S.Eliot, William Faulkner, Ginsberg, and a host of others because they made me feel ignorant. If I couldn't understand it, then the problem obviously lay with them. So, I'm not immune to the emotion.

But the list of those who make me feel that way has grown much smaller...Hell, I even finally figured out what the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets are up to. I think they're giving up on poetry in a way, but that's a different essay.

I started this blog out thinking about all those people who join MOAPG and don't participate as if they were some mysterious phenomenon, but I think I get it now. Keep on reading when you can.

Best,
Stephen Morse