To Entertain

I, myself, do not read poetry for anything but pleasure. I read only the poems I like..…All that matters about poetry is the enjoyment of it, however tragic it may be. All that matters is the eternal movement behind it, the vast undercurrent of human grief, folly, pretension, exaltation, or ignorance—Dylan Thomas

In the opening essay in Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Chabon writes, “…I read for entertainment, and I write to entertain. Period. Oh, I could decoct a brew of other more impressive motivations and explanations.”

Chabon then brews a few impressive sounding motivations before continuing, “But in the end—here’s my point—it would still all boil down to entertainment, and its suave henchman, pleasure. Because when the axe bites the ice, you feel an answering throb of delight all the way from your hands to your shoulders, and the blade tolls like a bell for miles.” He then lists some examples of literature that entertained him because his “interior ear” had been engaged “by the rhythms and pitch of a fine prose style.”

Chabon proposes “expanding our definition of entertainment to encompass everything pleasurable that arises from the encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature.” His essay is eloquently written, and discusses such things as some people’s unease with pleasure (which I ponder in The Power of Beauty and Expressive Range). Later Chabon writes:

The original sense of the word “entertainment” is a lovely one of mutual support through intertwining, like a pair of trees grown together, interwoven, each sustaining and bearing up the other. It suggests a kind of midair transfer of strength, contact across a void, like the tangling of cable and steel between two lonely bridgeheads. I can’t think of a better approximation of the relation between reader and writer.

My feelings about listener and composer are much the same. What matters to me is the listening experience—the experience the listener has when he or she hears the work performed. As I write in Expressive Range, rather than feeling isolated from the audiences I choose to write for, I feel we share a common goal: a desire to have exciting, entertaining, and rewarding experiences. In the theater even tragic subjects can give pleasure if the human drama, the writing, the production, and the performance are sufficiently engaging.