That is, until the interviewer realized I wasn’t Viggo [1] Mortensen [2]. The irony is that I don’t have a television and haven’t for years. And cable. Well, I think maybe I had cable service about a decade ago to watch the Olympics. So I was a bit embarrassed when the interviewer asked me if I had seen her show.
What the interviewer found fascinating is that the event I helped organize with two other people was promoted exclusively through social media and word of mouth. Most people who manage events work up a press release and send it to local print, radio, and television outlets. And in turn, local newspapers, radio and television stations pick up local entertainment news and add it to the calendar of events to fill in programming space. But that’s not how three people on a September afternoon began to plan an event.
Three weeks after that September afternoon, sixty people attended an invite-only poetry reading, book-signing and jazz show on a Friday night with almost no coverage [3] by the Mountain Xpress or Asheville Citizen-Times. The event was so far under the radar that it didn’t garner a mention on Ashvegas’s Asheville Hot Sheet [4]. To be honest, at the time I didn’t know if an event publicized exclusively through Twitter and Facebook and word-of-mouth would work. But it did. And I guess that’s why I was invited to a television interview regarding that event.
One comment made during the taping of the interview hasn’t left me. I don’t recall who said it, but someone observed that if poets watched a lot of television there would be less poetry in the world. Television has been around for at least 85 years. Most people reading this have grown up with access to television. This means most of you — specifically Gen-X and younger — grew up in a mass media culture. Interestingly, less than 60 years ago, the poet T.S. Eliot packed an university gymnasium with 15,000 people [5] to hear him lecture about literary criticism. Not exactly what you might call primetime broadcast material. At the time Eliot delivered his lecture, the average American earned a salary of $5300. A car cost $2100. A color television set cost between $500 to $1000 and a gallon of gasoline cost $0.30. [6] Cable television was on the horizon [7], but like network television it was only just becoming accessible to most Americans.
Now, an average gallon of gasoline costs $2.81. The average annual salary is $42,000. [8] And it seems ironic that now a cable television program may be making poetry more accessible to Americans. [9]
[1] Poet, painter and, oh, yeah, an actor. [2] He founded Perceval Press to publish his own books and CDs as well as other artist, poets, musicians and photographers. [3] Full disclosure, Mountain Xpress Blogwire did mention the event twice, but it’s not quite the same as opening a copy of Mountain Xpress on a Wednesday afternoon and reading a nice piece by Alli Marshall or one of the other writers covering Asheville’s vibrant entertainment scene. [4] There is always a lot of entertainment going on in Asheville. So I don’t fault Ashvegas for neglecting to mention an event that was not publicized in the traditional manner on the Asheville Hot Sheet. Maybe the event might get a mention if Dehlia Low or the Avett Brothers were part of it. [5] Is there a poet alive today that could lecture about literary criticism and pack out a gymnasium?. [6] When I look through the television history archives, I can help thinking that a lot of those old television screens were not much larger than an iPhone screen. [7] Now that there is Netflix, will that be the end of cable television? [8] I wonder if the average American salary includes under-employed and unemployed Americans? [9] Estimated viewership of local cable television ranges between 150,000 to 180,000.
Coffeehouse Junkie 