why do you want to write? to contribute to ‘the art’ or to entertain audiences? there are many types of poet and as many motivations to write and perform poetry. for the purpose of this article i would like to classify them broadly into their polar opposites namely:

the thinker is the aesthete, ‘the page poet’ uncaring of the morays of populous. friends are academics, poetry readings are more like funerals, the poetry is lyrical, modernist, postmodern or even avant garde...uses words like “trammelled,” & may actually hit on a piece of original thought or ‘deep’ insight...may also have a cardigan or two in the wardrobe.

the ‘crowd pleaser’ despises the cliquey and academic hold on ‘complicated poetry’ loves to perform, incorporates vernacular, the cultural, humour, wit, the topical/political into her/his work, and whose work perhaps employs rhyme and relatively simplistic forms...the crowd pleaser will be playing for popularity and as a result may discard the more involved poetry techniques that require work on the part of the audience.

I have dabbled in both these camps, but rarely manage to combine the positive features of both in one piece of work. trying to please everyone is hard. and both of these groups are widely criticised (often by one another). the ‘thinkers’ for pretention & excluding those that haven’t read widely, and the ‘crowd pleasers’ for ‘dumbing down’ their work and the subsequent loss of content. despite what divides these two extremes the ‘thinker’ needs some kind of ear to listen to his ideas and the ‘crowd pleaser’ needs a clever form or turn of phrase to justify her/his performance.

the ‘crowd pleasers’ may justify themselves by being more representative of the audiences they perform for and the wider population at large and be less elitist as a result. on the other side the ‘thinkers’’ dedication to originality and capturing ‘fine emotions’ or insights cannot be artificially made more accessible just for popularity’s sake.

to reconcile the popular and thought provoking is a rarely achieved thing, but some have attained it. bukowski who in his l.a. street talk along with discussing whores, fighting, drinking, racetracks etc manages to convey something meaningful, while at the same time being extremely widely read and conversational e.g in this extract from the mockingbird:

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