Why I feel like a dick when I laugh at coffee shop poets
September 7th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
The past couple of nights, Amber and I have run into a couple of coffee shop poets as we passed through various establishments in Decatur. Judging by those encounters, my natural reaction appears to be to laugh at them.
It occurred to me that bloggers and coffee shop poets have a lot in common:
I laugh because someone being really earnest about something that doesn’t register at all with me is funny. That’s a pretty shitty reaction. Some of the people I like least are people who have been similarly dismissive of blogging and all the surrounding society-transforming whizbangs.
And yet, there it is. I laugh at coffee shop poets.
It occurred to me that bloggers and coffee shop poets have a lot in common:
- We ply our respective vocations to small audiences composed of mostly people we know and of a few who just happened to wander by
- What we do seems earnest and lame to people who don’t understand it already
- We often believe our grasp of the English language is a wee bit better than it really is
- A few of us get paid, but most of us don’t.
I laugh because someone being really earnest about something that doesn’t register at all with me is funny. That’s a pretty shitty reaction. Some of the people I like least are people who have been similarly dismissive of blogging and all the surrounding society-transforming whizbangs.
And yet, there it is. I laugh at coffee shop poets.
