Platonic ideals are not actually out there in the ether past all the relativism.
Especially if you believe yourself, one gets in trouble with categorical statements. They can take an eye out with their gestures. The tumble to work out rules is fine so long as we all remember it’s a bit of nonsense to pass the time when there is no real meaning past the construction.
There’s a joust over this notion of Poetry which is all roughhousing romp, until someone needs an eye patch and it’s not even talk like a pirate day yet. Arrr, ready for leave before she comes to shore, mateys.
Internal consistency is hammered home thru schooling. Stay in register. Write yourself, your experience. Don’t appropriate voices. That’s not empathy nor creativity, that’s stealing. Lying. A funny concept for literature which is about fudging and mashing up what knows and cherry-picking whatever you see.
Varied voice is an absorbing idea. It appeals because it is a disavowal of this insistence on everything being about identity and self-expression. The notion of the primacy of self, and that hall of mirrors, is very cultural. One should defer to and grow the group is also a value. and instead brokers in ideas and being sharer of lives.
It’s more interesting to go eventually towards less funhouse brainfuck dazzle, more towards facets of understanding.
I suppose it all comes back to not taking self so terribly seriously. At the end there is no net gain. It’s all a wash. Darlings who win nobel prizes a decade later are a blank look. Devote your life to something or nothing, there’s no crown, just whether you made yourself feel miserable or pleased along the way and helped others enjoy or were more an impediment to their growth.
Does that mean there’s no sense to the question of good or bad poetry? Good or bad for what? for who? for when? There are people who are better at communicating. There is an outcome to putting in your 10,000 attentive hours but at the end the yield is more complex than one bottom line.
There’s no question that some poetry causes a visceral response as too emotional, too emotionless, too verbose, too stripped back, too dense, too dark, too light, too varied, too same-same, too derivative, too out there or in the grand buffet of bear house porridges, just perfectly right.
Is it best to find that perfectly right to your tongue? Or is that a romantic indulgence? Does that lead to fossilization or specialization? Temper tantrums more than pleasure? Reading is comparable to everything else, including dialogue. As Patti Digh put it:
Two monologues do not a dialogue make.[…]
How you have dialogue is more important than the subject matter of the dialogue. That’s important to remember. The subject matter seems primary. It is not. The way you conduct yourself in relationship to other human beings, and particularly those with whom you disagree, is the most important part. Forget the subject matter. Forget the vehemence with which you believe in something. The point is this: have you improved upon silence? Have you allowed yourself to hear another human being’s point of view and not just sat waiting for them to get to the period and shut up so you can dazzle them with your Truth (and brilliance, obviously)? Have you allowed for the possibility that they are as fully human as you are, even if they hold an opposing point of view? Or are you mainly playing to an audience?
One can read whatever one likes or whatever one dislikes but is one willing to be changed?
One can’t be so absorbent that each thing taken in, trumps whatever was there. That would make for vacillation worse than vaseline over everything.
It can’t be healthy to be all ease, nor all stretch. Mixing up what you read makes sure it isn’t a closed information loop. For my attention span and interests, I prefer to read many things in parallel, constantly washing my palate. It allows me to hear each one. The idea of “finding yourself”, “finding your voice” I’m skeptical of. Finding your best presentation of subject, maybe. If you can sustain one thought on one subject…but the dazzle of facets pulls me more.
Feminist Review recently looked at Elizabeth Robinson‘s book from a few months ago from Apogee Press (“Apogee Press publishes the work of innovative and experimental poets. Culturally and formally diverse, our poets share an original use of language.”).
In Also Known As (Apogee, 2009) Alicia Sowisdral says,
Robinson “interacts” with the work of Portuguese poet Fernando Passoa [sic] in an effort to “explore the opportunities and limitations of persona(e).” What is interesting and challenging about this task is that Passoa wrote most if his work under “heteronyms,” alter-egos with distinct personalities and unique poetic voices.
I don’t know whether I want to first go to Pessoa, who, when writing under dozens of heteronyms, writing personas, sounds like the predecessor to Erin Moure (and according to Bloom included Pessoa as one of 26 writers who established the parameters of western literature) or to Robinson’s work and see it for myself. It sounds intriguing. She’s 6 books in so is a diligently practiced poet.
But I have so much unread as is, not digested as much as I’d like.
And everything is in the implementation and timing, not the idea itself and whatever spark it causes.
Or is it? Does resonance “happen” to you like inspiration happens to you the passive carrier? Or is the agency in part in the sweat and choice? Aren’t most things an acquired taste and contextual, mattering because of who and what you care about and who and what you care about are fluid? Fine to draw a line in the sand but not to pretend god drew the line and it is unholy damnation to cross it. It served it’s use but its a vestigial scratch. Move without needing a line. Or, if you need the safety of circumspect methodical progression, draw another line.
How do we find the books we need? Do we need what we consciously think we do? So much the sense of so much to sort out when sort or don’t, life keeps coming. Still I want a considered life, control, rather than happenstance only. How to choose? What to pursue?
Sheena Iyengar was talking at TED about 3 culturally based assumptions about choice. The third rule of operation is that you presume it is best if you must never say no to another option.
However, as big box options of 40 varieties of toothpaste compete, with no immediate limit on new varieties and brands developing, this makes for some quandaries and time-wasters. Sure, you could just use the same toothpaste because you’ve always used it, and really the difference must be negligible if all you’re after is function. So go with that, if you can find it among the shelves, and rebranded colors and if supply keeps up. But you might just have to shop around.
Iyengar points out that there is a point at which, or a cultural loading from which, “choice no longer offers opportunities but imposes constraints. It’s not a marker of liberation but suffocation by meaningless minutiae.”
In population growth, literacy growth, more people with more priorities to spend on self-development, more people setting selves up as gatekeepers and more self-publishing, print and online, we have an exploded marketplace of poetry options. Some of it may be poetry and some Poetry but it doesn’t matter. There is a seemingly endless and increasing supply of poetry. Is this distressing deluge or refreshing hunt among the wonderful heavensent?
How to get what would resonate? Let me get back to that question: Is resonance a passive act that happens to you or is it a result of actively seeking to understand that which is out of grasp, and expanding one’s natural affinities and aesthetics? Would that be selling oneself short and closing oneself off unnecessarily? Or is that being reasonable and being able to hear, but still there is some variety of poetry that here and now pops as being It?
What’s to gain from more choices? Iyengar gives the example of giving 7 varieties of soft drinks to people and some seeing that as two options: soda or nothing to drink. When she added juice and water to make 9 things to drink, it was taken as 4 kinds of drink. I can understand that. A bar with dozens of wines and various beers on bottle on tap, or a few, the real options are reduced to water or more cranberry juice. If my interests of what I was looking for was wider, the real sense of good choices would be larger. If I wanted to open to compassion to listen to every individual’s story, well-told or poorly, thru bluster or raw, in abstractions or parable, then the sense of how much poetry there is grows. If I’m looking for what suits my mood and project and need and tastes, then it’s more of a binary, cola or thirsty choice.
Now one can see the usefulness of close-minded, stereotyping for stress-busting. False dichotomies save the time-suck of doing your own research into what someone is saying and why and from what and taking that in with an eye for how that would fit with your worldview. And most of the time, you might spend more time considering than the person did knocking off what they wrote as they were phoning it in until the next inspiration hits.
When you are on the verge of so much poetry whipping past, it all blurs into me-likey or me-no-likey and sometimes neither is more true than the other. Elaborate more. Refine to a checklist of qualities to automate the winnowing. That at least reduces what you’re willing to expose yourself to.
How something makes you feel matters. But how something makes you feel isn’t what something is. To be double-minded allows doubling back when what currently is It becomes a too familiar of staple.
Prejudice stays around because it functions; you have less data to consider. You can throw out more. Do that by any metric of form, aesthetic, gender of writer, age, subjects, mood, that one unpleasant poem back in ’87, what the writer said to you once, what is vetted by who one has pedestalled, who one knows personally, whatever’s handy to use to winnow it down.
It’s either that or laborious time investment. Some pattern will help make choices on who to listen to, where to spend that 3-hours you have squirreled away for leisure.
All of that is still assessment mode. Is one looking at poetry around like a mason at an art gallery, seeing commodities of marble and resale value and weight, or the statuary?
Collin Kelley was asking: How we can get back to the pleasure of the art rather than the jockeying for position, awards and writing personal attacks masquerading as “literary criticism?” [via Robert Lee Brewer]
Distinctions and observations can be made. Value judgements will be made. Value and values are a weave, partly inside you, partly outside you.
