Today seems to be the hip day for blog posting ... so I'm jumping in on the fun. I also found myself mulling over the idea of readership(s), wondering who--if anyone--is my ideal reader, or for whom these texts are being created (besides the self; I suppose that's a given). Most of my friends are not poets--they are musicians, ecologists, bicyclists, painters, herpetologists, etc., and though they don't overtly care about poetry or poetics, they do encourage and seek out anything original (that is, anything that doesn't bore them). My "closest" readers have always been those of a more worldly--less text-based--sense of existence, and therefore my texts have become something that seeks to avoid boredom, and seeks to exist in a more scientific--or at least dirty/gritty--realm. I suppose one's readership can, in turn, further influence a writing toward something, maybe a distinct focus of sorts (?).

This is where I think Dillon's latest series is a wonderful sense of text-based activism, in that it creates an attempt at universal readership: it attempts equal distribution -- something art often aspires to, but seldom reaches. It seems to be a beautifully socialist ideology. While maintaining a sense of poetic/textual integrity, it also reaches beyond the page into a guerrilla movement of citywide social-poetics in a search for a humbling-yet-uplifting universalism.

...and maybe Jen is on to something with her Epicurean studies. Isn't a readership--and also a workshop--a withdrawal from public uncertainties into private communities of somewhat like-minded folks. A non-prohibitive mini-utpoia experiment that--temporarily--allows us to seek our pleasures in a non-injurious moderation. It all seems to be metaphysically rooted in a deeper nature of things (I couldn't resist a cheap Lucretius reference. sorry). Or maybe the readership itself is the movement from within the workshop structure out into that uncertain public. Like Lucretius's poems, texts circulated outside of the inner-circle in an artistically social/ethical attempt to import certain ideas/aesthetics into an ambivalent culture. I guess that's why he killed himself.

Alright. I'm done.