The subject of today’s panel is “Poetry and the Media.” Such a title more or less dictates the subject matter of the response. In one corner, there is “poetry”--usually encountered in books but sometimes in live performances, in newspapers, or even on television or radio or in films. In the other corner, there are “the Media”--a term which usually refers to radio, television, and the press, sometimes to films, rarely to books. A panel on “Poetry and the Media” is likely to discuss the presence (or lack of presence) of poetry on the radio, as in Garrison Keillor’s recitations, or on television, as in Bob Holman’s series, The USA of Poetry or Bill Moyers’ The Language of Life, or in the newspapers, as in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s intermittent column in The San Francisco Chronicle. Such a discussion would also touch on the Internet and on the “Slam” phenomenon. Generally speaking, the word “poetry” is avoided in the titles of television programs dealing with the subject; Bob Holman is to be congratulated for actually using the word in his title. The word poetry is understood by many to be a turn-off. In the film, Meet the Parents, someone announces that the Robert de Niro character is going to read a “poem”: we know the horror that is coming!

We could discuss whether poetry is “effectively presented” in these various media, or whether one particular medium presents it better than another. We might suggest that poetry is better suited to one medium than to another: might argue, for example, that it is more effectively presented in the aural world of radio than in the visual world of television--despite the fact that many people talk about a poem’s “images” and that world literature boasts an astonishing number of “concrete” or “visual” poems, a resource that has never been exploited by television or film. We could discuss in what manner the kinds of techniques used in presenting radio and television programs have affected poetry. Are our attention spans shorter than they used to be? (What is an “attention span”?) Do we now need “sound bytes” in our poetry? Is an aphorism a sound byte? How has the complex world of music, of popular song, affected poetry?

There is surely much to be said about all these subjects, but I intend to take a somewhat different tack.

It seems to me that in postulating a subject like “Poetry and the Media,” we are already thinking of  poetry as part of a medium or media, so that the title of the panel should really be “Some Kinds of Media and Other Kinds of Media.” A poem always already exists in a medium--whether the medium is the page or the mouth of the poet or whatever. A poem of Larry Eigner’s was once inscribed on the outside wall of the Berkeley Museum: that was its medium. Indeed, poetry cannot exist without a medium: there is no ur-poem or archepoem which exists outside the condition of manifestation; and no poem is anything more than the manifestation of a medium.

My friend Ivan Argüelles handwrote a poem in a spiral notebook while sitting in a Berkeley student hang-out called “Kip’s.” He then phoned me to ask what I thought of the poem. Later, he typed the poem onto a piece of white paper. Using that paper as a “score,” he recited the poem at a reading in Berkeley. He also sent “copies” by e-mail to various friends. Later still, he published the poem in a literary magazine. It may have appeared in an online magazine as well. Finally, it became part of a book, in which it would be read and perhaps memorized and recited by other people. Some of these people might like it enough to e-mail it to their friends. Each of these manifestations--spiral notebook, phone call, white paper, recitation, magazine, electronic publication, book--is separate and distinct from all the others. The version of the poem which appears in each of them is separate and distinct from all the others as well.

But, surely, it may be objected, while these various media are all admittedly somewhat different from one another, they are all manifesting some thing--and that thing exists apart from and prior to any medium. That is a very Platonic idea, and it has considerable appeal in our neo-neo-neo-neo-neo Platonic civilization. But is it true?

We might ask: Doesn’t the poem exist first “in the poet’s mind”--before it is on paper or spoken? Isn’t it there before it shows itself in any medium? These questions can be answered, but the answers require a slight adjustment of our thinking. Rarely is the poem “complete” in the poet’s mind: usually it comes into being in a struggle between mind and--a medium: paper, speaking aloud, whatever. That is the period in which the poet is “working on” the poem. But, beyond this, we must understand that mind itself is a medium--or the postulation of a medium--and that it is only by analogy with mind that media exist. Or, more accurately perhaps, it is only by analogy with media that the concept of “mind” exists. We can write a poem only because the poem is already being conceived of as “written.” “Mind” is like the paper of a book or like the sound of a speaking voice: it is the primary context within which the verbal or visual event takes place; it is that which we forget as we listen to the poet describing his wonderful adventures in the world of thought. But without that primary context the poet’s description could not exist at all.

In a famous passage from her book, Everybody’s Autobiography, Gertrude Stein slandered Oakland, California by writing, “There is no there there.” The medium is the poem’s “there,” and it keeps on changing: mind, spiral notebook, phone call, white paper, recitation, magazine, electronic publication, book. These are all media. The poem does not birth itself in the poet’s mind and then go on from there to manifest in various media: it simply shifts from one medium to another, as indeed it does when the poet is working on the poem. From this point of view, there are nothing but media--various ways in which the poem shows itself. But there is no poem apart from these media. We can of course privilege one medium over another; we can personally prefer one medium to another: each has its strengths and limitations. In our culture, print has enjoyed considerable privilege: fear that this privilege may be ending--or challenged--has brought forth a bevy of cries that our “children don’t read enough,” that people are becoming “illiterate.” But writing manifests in a number of media--it is not limited to print--and, without the medium, there is no writing. There is not even silence, which, like everything else, requires a medium.

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb--
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing--nothing at all.