I just happened on the following passage from Karl Young’s introduction at Light and Dust to his two early books, Cried and Measured, and Should Sun Forever Shine.  I had to post it here because it so exactly states what I’ve been saying for many years, with little effect, except occasionally to inspire hostile responses from the anti-intellectual  school of the Wordsworthian “We murder to dissect” variety.

“How best to provide the (engagent of unfamiliar, relatively new forms of art) with adequate context and background, I don’t know. I do know that the lack of it has crippled visual poetry, as it has other arts, and trying to find an answer to the problem is one of the reasons for writing essays like this one. Whatever the case, in the global world of information overload, the concept that ‘the work speaks for itself’ can be no more than nostalgia for a simpler time with a unified and unchanging cultural background. In the broadest context, what has now become the superstition that avant-garde work can be appreciated without context denies and blocks the possibilities of cooperative construction and understanding in an environment that no individual has the ability to completely comprehend, but which requires cooperation to appreciate.”

.                                                                         Karl Young