This is one great quote that I won’t forget. I’m sick and tired of novelist trying to write a 1000 pages novel and in the end, it’s just the same last scene that you will find in any other books. Tired of reading the blah blah blah when it end ups in the same line. In today’s generation, you can hardly find a great piece of story where you can really sit all day reading that novel.

And that is that writing is always dialogical. At least you hope it is. And who is your audience?

I can write a poem that engages the interior experience, I can push toward profundity, not in a haughty way but as a reach toward something deeply meaningful and revealing. And who am I writing for. As my early mentor, Robert McNamara, used to say – If you’re writing really good poetry, you’re writing stuff that 1% of the population can or care to read.

And if we protest that that’s who we care to reach, isn’t that a bit of a self indulgence and maybe even a cop out at some level. The real trick in writing, the challenge that makes us stretch beyond what we can do, is to write both profoundly and popularly. That’s what make Robert Frost such a remarkable force for me. He was very popular but didn’t write simple rhymes. He was profound but not unreachable.

Great writing is always a wrestling match. If the writer wins too easily it’s because we aren’t challenging ourselves enough.

Sheilds rails against formula fiction and fiction’s formulas. He sees himself as a lone prophet on a lonely streetcorner, or a voice in the wilderness. How is this possible? The whole history of international fiction of the last 50 years has been “How to Make it New.” I’ve been reading Calvino’s “Cosmicomics.” In the first chapter he makes fun of traditional fiction and the formulaic piling up of details. In one paragraph he makes a list of items until the list itself just becomes absurd with junk. David, yuo ain’t alone, far from it.

A few blocks down from Sheild’s street corner (I picture him in Seattle’s Pioneer Square) there is a huge stadium (Saefco) full of like-minded literary malcontents. I think William Gass is the Keynote Speaker.

I tend to think about these sorts of questions through a metaphor of a continuum between poetry and fiction. On one end is poetry, an investigation of states of being and the inherent beauty of language. At the other end is genre fiction, that which is about utility and movement. The metaphor tends to fall apart the more one considers specific writers, but I find it useful, especially when talking to my students. I remember having an argument once with Shya Scanlon (Hi, Shya) about whether Gary Lutz’s work should be considered fiction or poetry. Shya said poetry, I said fiction, he said potato, I said potahto, and we called the whole thing off. But the conversation really set in motion for me some years of thinking about this issue. Rick’s right in that questions about genre are really a shelving problem, but the conflict between say science fiction and literary fiction may be less severe than the conflict between poetry and literary fiction. I’m not sure conflict is the right word, either. But if we look beyond the obvious formal differences between poetry and fiction and ask what we seek them out *for* it seems that Shields is grumpy about not being able to order a Big Mac at KFC.

Absolutely nothing is wrong with “jamming.” Nothing.

However, when an inexperienced musician “jams” and then passes of this jam as “music,” (as opposed to what it is: a lazy jam) he or she is no longer “jamming” but is attempting to create music for the consumption of others; it is appropriate to then approach the “jam” as such. That doesn’t make jamming wrong, but it does open the “jammed” music up to criticism. Extend the analogy to writers.

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The guitarists you mention are masters of their particular idiom – a mastery that come from, literally, a lifetime commitment to their instrument. As such, often a “jam” among musicians at that rarefied level approaches an excellent example of music within that idiom. This should not be confused with a “jam” among inexperienced players, though the same word is used when speaking of both. Extend the analogy to writers.