``Neither Herron nor Rorty seems to know the first two or three
things about poetry, though Herron begins to guess at them
with some success.  The first thing is that poetry must of logical necessity
be beautiful, and the second thing is that poetry must delight the
minds of the people who are listening or reading for the wrong reason.
In this, a poetry audience is like a circus audience from the point of
view of Katja Schumann, an exquisitely good horsewoman and star
of The Big Apple, a delectable and sometimes virtually faultless
one-ring circus.

``Once it came about that she complained to her father, Max
Schumann, of the 150-year-old Danish Circus Schumann, about the
audience's lack of comprehension, about those Yahoos, those
Philistines, etc.  Just as Herron, in a more world-weary way, diagnoses
the Yahoos who walked out on his friend's reading.  Katja's father
said, ``Yes.  But in every audience there is one guy who knows what
you are doing.  And: _he paid for his ticket._''  (Perhaps her father had
read Goethe's Faust, in which the clown says about the rabble that
comprises the bulk of the audience, ``The presence of a decent lad
out there / Amounts to something, I should say.''

Vicki Hearne, ``Comment,'' _Raritan_ X:3, Winter 1991, p.147