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If you permit the simile, poetry is like that girlfriend. You know the one. You were crazy, hopelessly, eat tofu burgers in love with her. But in those moments when you weren’t busy worshipping the ground, you happened to notice that your friends, others in your circle, acquaintances… at best seemed oblivious to her, at worst had sidelong nasty things to say about her. Later, after you’d broken up (you know the details so I won’t bore you), from your fresh perspective this mild antipathy started to make sense. You still loved her (love her) of course, but also realized part of what created value in the relationship is that no one but you “got it.”

We never really broke up, poetry and I. Not exactly. As a writer I’d reached that stage where there were enough journal publications to move on to “the book.” It was, on one hand, exhilarating that I was about to take that step. On the other, I found it a little… unsatisfying… that the process seemed too linear, too eventual. More on that below. In the meantime I’d found a new mistress in the world of experimental music. My reading and “making” had shifted over to the unfolding of sounds into narratives. And my writing became mostly about what excited me in that field. My poetry affairs: Carson, Carver, Thompson and McKay, now had to share me with my music ones: Fennesz, Basinski, Ielasi and Toral. Over time this duality began to reveal both commonalities and discrepancies.

At first I seemed to be trading one obscure aesthetic field for another. The names of the poets and musicians above are equally unknown to the “man on the street.” In fact they are likely unknown to fairly avid readers or music fans if those folks don’t make the specific trips over to where this stuff lives. But aside from smallish audiences what do poetry and… let’s call it new music… have in common? Both exist at the outer edge of their languages. They are the forms that break new ground, use unexpected combinations to express either new ideas or long standing ones that benefit from little shocks or big pushes. They can ask big questions. They can offer researched answers. But after looking at them side by side for about a decade I’ve come to a conclusion that their root difference is: new music actively gathers to it an audience whereas poetry seems content being left alone.

Now poetry will tell you this is not true. It will claim that it treasures its audience and that it wants only to share with people its lessons on beauty and truth. It will point to the various prestigious awards and associations and federations that celebrate and enshrine it. It will push its shining examples to the front of the racks in order to woo you. But behind that gloss there are a few glitches that spoil things.

There is the war for the pie. If, like me, you were instructed in poetry then your training prepares you for a linear process (as I mentioned above) of career development that is: study, replicate, individuate, submit (to journals where the people who guided you are also editors), publish, collate, submit manuscript (to presses where the editors of the journals have friends who owe them favours), get your book, tour, make connections, get reviewed in journals and papers (by the people you made connections with on tour), award nominations/wins, get a foil stamp on your book. Repeat. A piece of the pie is yours.

Meanwhile, over there, away from “the process” are these figures that run little desktop published journals or presses or, now, webzines. It seems every city has at least one. They book readings, write reviews, bug booksellers, organize or curate events and attend every other event outside their purview. They keep the pilot light of poetry on. But the linear poetry world looks over and sees either someone stealing a piece of the pie, or baking a flaky but bland pie of their own. And the problem is when you bring that bad pie to the bake sale it subtly ruins the whole event. And don’t even get them started on Slam Poetry. All meringue, no pie at all.

February 13, 2010, it’s the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, and Shane Koyczan, a Slam Poet from the Yukon celebrates Canada to an audience of 3.5 billion people. The Twitter / YouTube world claps onto him, the Canadian press holds him aloft on its shoulders declaiming that “this would never happed in the USA.” In our country we are not afraid to love poetry, more than guns or all you can eat buffets. Except. Except I can guarantee you that in more than one English faculty lounge on Monday morning, over the first coffee of the day, members of the linear world grimly shook their heads and bemoaned how bad the poem (and they would say the word “poem” like a thirteen year old girl says “whatever”) Koyczan performed was. How sad it is that the uninformed world would now think of that as poetry.

So is it? Is that poetry? Is a performance of language that plays for the hearts of billions of spectators poetry, or is it just propaganda? After all aren’t poetry readings supposed to be town library / art gallery affairs that attract audiences in the low double digits? This is another part of the poetry-as-pie issue: don’t take too many pieces. Some writers, even alumni of “the process,” unwittingly get too many mentions on the CBC, too many column inches in the Globe and Mail, too many prize nominations, and stick around too long. I’ve heard the grumbling over this. After all it isn’t your pie, it is poetry’s pie. And poetry’s pie has a mildly communist recipe. Its special successes are noted only in foil stamps that push book sales from the low to high hundreds. That is the kind of notice poetry finds acceptable.

In the end, even though poetry and I aren’t as exclusive as we were at first, I still love it. I love its possibilities and scope. And I love the people who are truly the best at its creation… their work is one of the few things that keeps language alive, moving forward. But still I wonder if anyone in this group notices or cares that it they seem to be hoarding the pie.

This past autumn at an annual poetry weekend held in Fredericton there was a fleeting moment of clarity. After the last block of readings, Brian Bartlett, who had been taking pictures of the event, invited all the poets onto the stage so that he could take a “class picture.” Once all the writers were huddled together one of them noted that only about 8-10 people were left in the auditorium. It was a ratio of three poets for every listener. Early that weekend, in conversation with a friend, a poet several (very good) books into their publishing career, I asked if this general indifference by the public towards poetry ever got them down while they were touring. Their answer was essentially “not really, it’s just great to be able to see the country. Without the travel grants I’d probably never get to visit friends.”