[New-Poetry] Poetic Justice

[Anny Ballardini]

Kant, Kirkegaard, Wittgenstein, ...
whom do you remind me this morning Grumman?
He is a German philosopher but cannot remember well ...

On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 12:19 PM, Bob Grumman <bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net>wrote:

>  John Jeffrey wrote:
>
>  "...a huge number of men in the States who bewail how much professional
> athletes are paid--yet spend ten percent or more of their lives watching
> them."
>
> And there's the prize in the Cracker Jack box:  A football player is an
> entertainer; a nurse is not. And an entertainer's pay is based on the number
> of people willing to pay to be entertained by them. (Either directly or
> through the third party.) It's a fairly straight-forward system, but it's
> cruel--if you cease to draw fans willing to plunk down a twenty, you're out
> on your helmet.  Because of this, there are no "merely acceptable" football
> players with long careers. They have to be the best at what they do--even
> counting arean football, there are only about 100 professional quarterbacks
> in the country. But there are millions of nurses, and a percentage of them
> can be "merely acceptable," and yet still have long careers.  Not so with
> football players, or any entertainers.  Ask the footballer who broke his leg
> as a rookie, or the singer of a one-hit wonder singer, or a writer like poor
> Melville.
>
> I would argue that poetry--or any art--is also an entertainment.  And even
> within the smaller circle of the poetry world, this holds true.  The poets
> that sell the most earn the most money (as little as that may be) while the
> otherstreams (to borrow a phrase) do not.  Then again, it seems to me that
> many modern artists seems almost anathema to popularity, even hostile to
> it.  So why should they be paid for something that a vast majority of the
> people will not buy?
>
> Because the vast majority of people WILL buy it from the tenth-raters with
> the rights to their work after they're dead.  And because the contemporary
> mediocrities are getting all that's interesting in their poetry from them.
>
>    I'd bet that if otherstream poetry suddenly became popular, and there
> were rectangles and division symbols on greeting cards, and Hallmark offered
> salaried positions to otherstream poets, they would all think that they must
> be doing something wrong.
>
> JohnJ
>
> As they should.  Because the essence of creativity is to do something new,
> and the essence of Hallmark-level commercial success is to repeat the worst
> of the old.
>
> --Bob G.
>
>
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>


-- 
Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html
I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing
star!
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