The Medium, Convention, and, Broke Poets


Who the hell said that the bedroom is the best room to have sex in?

One person laughs at a not-so-funny joke, and the rest laugh at his laugh.

I love “watching” poetry, but I passionately hate having to “read” it.

While eWandering on Facebook, I overheard overread a poet rant that she has published four poetry books, and yet she is still struggling to make ends meet.

To those of the same sentiment as the third sentence, she’s a victim of convention.

Regardless of how poetic a poet’s work might be; to poetry fanatics who aren’t fond of consuming poetry from a piece of paper, publishing such work as a print book dramatically reduces the odds of the poet’s ideas spreading.

The synthesis of alphabets, punctuation marks, ink, and paper is not the best vehicle to transport poetry; the merger of the poet’s voice, tone of voice, facial expressions, body language, and the likes, is.

Ideas are way more important than the medium used to spread them. The medium is merely a means to an end. Not the end.

No fancy font could have evoked the same emotions in people who listened to “We are the world” should the song have been published in print, as opposed to audio.

In writing, words are powerful, but there’s only so much that they can do or carry.

Wouldn’t poetry spread faster, and wider, if it’s primarily published as audio — or, ideally, audiovisual?

Reading “sigh” doesn’t have the same effect as hearing (or ideally seeing) the poet sigh in between rhymes and figures of speech.

Imagine if photographers used words to describe their portfolio, as opposed to showcasing the actual photographs. God forbid.

I can imagine a photographer saying to a prospect client, “Er, Imagine a land covered with green grass, colourful multitudes of a wide range of flowers, eight birds in the sky that’s sans clouds…” — just show them the damn landscape, dammit!

Michael Jackson’s Thriller is up to this time the best selling album of all time. But I doubt that it would have touched the very same number of people, let alone sell a 110 million copies should it have been published as a print book.

A slight change of the medium could augment the spread of poetry, and more likely, deepen the poet’s pockets. Bingo!

(Ideas touch more lives. While the idea merchant gets to pay rent on time.)




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— September 23, 2010.