Imagine if all poets were told that they should try to deliver their ideas in haiku form. Imagine that this was becoming gradually the standard form of poems and that everyone thought that this was just great – ‘Hey, great! I can read The Wasteland in 10 seconds and then get back to the 8 Strangest Men Who Look Like Dogs Who Look Like A Picture Of a Strange Cloud. Great!’
Or imagine if the trend was for all poems to be delivered in a form which allowed them to be experienced exactly how the reader wanted (digital being the usual choice because it allows the greatest degree of accessibility). Imagine that social and commercial pressure to produce art which fit the boundaries of a smart phone (and the boundaries of the smart phone user’s brain) was brought to bear on poets.

It wouldn’t take long before large numbers of poets committed themselves to writing poems which could not be attenuated and digested in such a prescribed manner. They would probably write poems which were as long and indirect as was achievable – that seems like the easiest way. Or they might just fill their poems with the most obscene grotesqueries they can summon – that’s another popular method. And it’s their right to do that and they should exercise that right. Giving the user so much control over form subtly alters the product at best, and can even change its meaning entirely. And because the user is in command, less of the artist’s consciousness is being projected through his or her art, thus losing one of the things which makes art special, surely?

Anyway, to cut a long story short, Stew is – I think – arguing for the artist to be as firm about the form of their work as they are about the content, even if it means losing out in terms of accessibility. It is idealistic, because writers, for example, obviously have to hand over their work to their publisher at some point. Plus, most need to make money. But, comedians seem to be bending over – or liberating themselves, as the writer puts it – in a way which poets and other artists never would. There are few left like Stewart Lee, who buck the trend by only dealing in long and deeply-contextualised routines, or like Jerry Sadowitz, who kick the stable owner in the face with comedy as obscene and genuinely unrestrained as your average psychopath. He’s getting some of them together at the end of May, partly, it seems, to prove that the these things are important.