Late Blooming
Full, low, in the soft west,
Dusted by vague shades of dawn,
Stunning in the indistinct
Horizon left as night moves on.
Slow, sure, in the cool eve,
Lingering under an arbor,
Pungent ivory infiltrates
The somnolescent garden.
Molten, pulsing, churning the east,
The seething, brazen disc
Forges through the overcast,
Sears away the mist.
The morning moon, the lunar bloom, the cloud-obstructed sun
Assert dominion tardily
As night moves on.
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
On Poetry
On Poetry
There is no good reason to write poetry except sheer adventure. Once solely occupied with the deeds of kings and heroes, poetry today is democratized to the point where any man or woman can be a hero, any life an odyssey. Some say this trivializes greatness. Others see it as a profound, new freedom. Either view affirms that poetry celebrates the daring and nobility of the human spirit.
There is another reason to write poetry, one more homely but not altogether without merit: we write poems in order to act freely, truly, directly. We need no credential to do so, no apparatus more complex than pen, paper, and alphabet. The most rigorous training in poetics counts for little if the heart quails or hand fails. Writing poetry is an adventure in and assertion of personality. Poems that fail either substitute a stereotype for the truly individual, or shrink from full disclosure, writing around the subject instead of exploring it firsthand. But the most common reason poems fail is that they are not ever written.
There are good reasons for this failure. We stand to gain little by taking the time to write a poem, while we risk exposure and ridicule for wasting time and effort in such unprofitable action. This provides a strong incentive to ignore the call, to fail to act poetically. We also risk the charge that by writing our little poems, we have been too selfish in a world full of need. Poets are often guilty of failure in civic and economic duties. Had we not been writing, we could have served on some sort of board, enacted or advanced legislation, bought or sold something, or volunteered for charity. There is small time for tilting at verbal windmills with so much real, serious work to be done.
In contrast to society’s pressing material and organizational needs, it is because the poet needs so little that so little is given. Part of the discipline of the craft is to accept this, and be content without becoming resentful. Poets are rich in freedom. Being free, they lack support. Such is the price of freedom. No one tells corporate attorneys to work less. Our whole society encourages, even demands their efforts, couching envious respect in sour jokes. Nor do we commonly think of business executives as needing or having support systems or safety nets – even though they are practically invulnerable thanks to societal approval and golden parachutes. Instead, we honor them as “self-made mavericks” who can “think outside the box”.
Meanwhile, those few souls brave and strong enough live beyond the cardboard pale we castigate as silly, lazy, or both. Tacitly acknowledging the danger they pose, we question their sanity, calling them crazy for daring to challenge the assumption that more is better. We exhort them to give up poetry, and to get a job, a mortgage, a haircut, and a clue. When we do so, we sing a siren-song more enticingly, more dangerously than we know.
Despite such temptation, poets go on writing. Some are even flippant enough to suggest that this constitutes their value-added contribution to society. As if society needs art, or there is a market for poetry. We have few poems celebrating corporations, institutions, or movements – the poetry of causes is suspect and doesn’t last. But we do have poems, lots of very good poems about people, how they feel, how they act and interact, their conflicts and resolutions. This is the society and the culture that the poet cares about and takes part in. It’s not the governing, loaning, buying, or selling the poet shies from, much less the loving and hating. It’s the involuntary inclusion in faceless and inhuman entities whose demands leave us drained and scattered at the end of the day. Poets instinctively avoid assimilation, for they cannot bear its pain – a sifted, muted pain that grows like compound interest, overtaxing the nerves and rendering them numb. In return, society shuns poets as irrelevant.
So the social utility of poetry is tonic: it provides a little wilderness for the soul, a refuge for the individual against social sprawl. Protected by societal labels of freak, loon, dreamer, or rebel, the poet survives as a fringe-dweller, a living sign-post at the edge of society. Beyond that twilit frontier, lies freedom, lies adventure. There and back again, the poet, the thief-king of outcasts and bringer-of-new-things leads the way.
What he brings back, the territory she settles a few bold steps at time, creates out of chaos a world for society to grow into. Meanwhile, cautionary tales of the poet’s life keeps the press of life at bay, preserving room for the soul to grow, out there, over the horizon, where dragons and barbarians dwell. Derelict gate-keeper, free-lance scout, profane settler, and world-weaver – these are the poet’s jobs. Dangerous work it is, lonely and important too. So post the note: Brazen adventurers needed. Safe return uncertain. Meek inheritors need not apply.
There is no good reason to write poetry except sheer adventure. Once solely occupied with the deeds of kings and heroes, poetry today is democratized to the point where any man or woman can be a hero, any life an odyssey. Some say this trivializes greatness. Others see it as a profound, new freedom. Either view affirms that poetry celebrates the daring and nobility of the human spirit.
There is another reason to write poetry, one more homely but not altogether without merit: we write poems in order to act freely, truly, directly. We need no credential to do so, no apparatus more complex than pen, paper, and alphabet. The most rigorous training in poetics counts for little if the heart quails or hand fails. Writing poetry is an adventure in and assertion of personality. Poems that fail either substitute a stereotype for the truly individual, or shrink from full disclosure, writing around the subject instead of exploring it firsthand. But the most common reason poems fail is that they are not ever written.
There are good reasons for this failure. We stand to gain little by taking the time to write a poem, while we risk exposure and ridicule for wasting time and effort in such unprofitable action. This provides a strong incentive to ignore the call, to fail to act poetically. We also risk the charge that by writing our little poems, we have been too selfish in a world full of need. Poets are often guilty of failure in civic and economic duties. Had we not been writing, we could have served on some sort of board, enacted or advanced legislation, bought or sold something, or volunteered for charity. There is small time for tilting at verbal windmills with so much real, serious work to be done.
In contrast to society’s pressing material and organizational needs, it is because the poet needs so little that so little is given. Part of the discipline of the craft is to accept this, and be content without becoming resentful. Poets are rich in freedom. Being free, they lack support. Such is the price of freedom. No one tells corporate attorneys to work less. Our whole society encourages, even demands their efforts, couching envious respect in sour jokes. Nor do we commonly think of business executives as needing or having support systems or safety nets – even though they are practically invulnerable thanks to societal approval and golden parachutes. Instead, we honor them as “self-made mavericks” who can “think outside the box”.
Meanwhile, those few souls brave and strong enough live beyond the cardboard pale we castigate as silly, lazy, or both. Tacitly acknowledging the danger they pose, we question their sanity, calling them crazy for daring to challenge the assumption that more is better. We exhort them to give up poetry, and to get a job, a mortgage, a haircut, and a clue. When we do so, we sing a siren-song more enticingly, more dangerously than we know.
Despite such temptation, poets go on writing. Some are even flippant enough to suggest that this constitutes their value-added contribution to society. As if society needs art, or there is a market for poetry. We have few poems celebrating corporations, institutions, or movements – the poetry of causes is suspect and doesn’t last. But we do have poems, lots of very good poems about people, how they feel, how they act and interact, their conflicts and resolutions. This is the society and the culture that the poet cares about and takes part in. It’s not the governing, loaning, buying, or selling the poet shies from, much less the loving and hating. It’s the involuntary inclusion in faceless and inhuman entities whose demands leave us drained and scattered at the end of the day. Poets instinctively avoid assimilation, for they cannot bear its pain – a sifted, muted pain that grows like compound interest, overtaxing the nerves and rendering them numb. In return, society shuns poets as irrelevant.
So the social utility of poetry is tonic: it provides a little wilderness for the soul, a refuge for the individual against social sprawl. Protected by societal labels of freak, loon, dreamer, or rebel, the poet survives as a fringe-dweller, a living sign-post at the edge of society. Beyond that twilit frontier, lies freedom, lies adventure. There and back again, the poet, the thief-king of outcasts and bringer-of-new-things leads the way.
What he brings back, the territory she settles a few bold steps at time, creates out of chaos a world for society to grow into. Meanwhile, cautionary tales of the poet’s life keeps the press of life at bay, preserving room for the soul to grow, out there, over the horizon, where dragons and barbarians dwell. Derelict gate-keeper, free-lance scout, profane settler, and world-weaver – these are the poet’s jobs. Dangerous work it is, lonely and important too. So post the note: Brazen adventurers needed. Safe return uncertain. Meek inheritors need not apply.
The Economics of Poetry (and the Future of Journalism?)
The Economics of Poetry (and the Future of Journalism?)
Poetry is alive and well. It thrives and pays better than ever before despite – not because of – a proliferation of MFA programs, quarterly journals, and literary prizes. To understand this, we must recognize poetry for what it is in essence, and for what it is today. When we do so, we’ll see where our poets are, and what they’re doing to make so much money. We’ll also understand why this conflicts with conventional understanding, and how the rebirth of journalism will invigorate our verse, and so our world.
To begin, poetry means “making”. What we make with or through poetry is nothing less than our world. Traditionally, this has entailed ordering perception by ordering sounds, words, and ideas. Poetry is not the only creative approach to life, but unlike the graphic and plastic arts, because it uses words poetry deals with ideas more explicitly than any other art form. Poetry directly verbalizes things to which other arts give color, shape, and texture – elements which we describe and consciously understand through words applied after the fact.
The basic method of poetic ordering is repetition. If rhyme and rhythm are just the repetition of sounds and stresses in interwoven patterns, poetic repetition of words, phrases, and themes are a scaled-up version of the same practice. If we are that which we choose to repeat, repetitive poetry provides a handle to both individual and social identities. In other words, any poem can provide ideas about what we are or want to become as individuals. It can also provide ideas about how we might interact as members of a society, and what the shared values of that society are or should be. This is the link between journalism and poetry. Journalism documents life, so deals with “are”. Poetry deals with idealized life, and “should be”.
Poetic repetition exists within single poems, and among the poems of a tradition. That is, in any one poem a poet may use sounds, syllables, words, and phrases for poetic effect to help form and refine ideas. Those ideas, and even the effects used to create them, may then be repeated across poems, across time, even across traditions. This is how poetry makes the world. Making the world is a big part of poetry’s social utility. The other part is introducing a sense of adventure into it (this is explored in “On Poetry”).
The key realization about the economics of poetry is that poets are makers. Professional makers prefer to use the best tool for the job. Utility tends to be their guiding principle. Like their fellows in other crafts, they master the tools of their craft, refine both tools and technique, and when necessary for progress, discard old tools and ways in favor of new. Sometimes, the way forward is found by a return to beginnings, either by elaborating on an overlooked strain, or remixing several old ones into something new. In any event, a maker tends to be less sentimental than utilitarian regarding choice of tools. Significantly, sentimentality in poetry is widely and rightly derided as poor craftsmanship.
For ages, literally, from the Stone Age through the Victorian Age, poets made the world by transmitting their vision of it through the individual voice. Essentially, the only technological changes directly relevant to poetry over this broad stretch of time were the proliferation of musical instruments for accompaniment, the development of writing, and the invention of the printing press. Radio might have furthered poetry per se – and did, after a fashion -- but the quick arrival of “talking pictures” gave it stiff competition, and continues to do so today.
Motion pictures added picture to the voice and music of traditional poetry. For artists concerned with making the world, the opportunity to enrich their work by adding a whole new dimension was not to be missed. For artists concerned with envisioning a world, the chance to do so literally, by adding picture to word and song, had to be taken. Makers who seek to produce the highest quality work will use the best tools and materials available. The 20th century offered poets – makers – a new tool in cinema, and most of the best of them took it up. For evidence, consider how the radio play died with the advent of television as writing talent followed the money to Hollywood. Consider as well that today we quote lines from movie scripts, rather than lines from poems.
When this talent shift occurred would be hard to pinpoint exactly, but somewhere between the Great Depression and the end of the Second World War seems likely, with Yeats, Eliot, and Frost marking the end of the line of poetry as it’s generally conceived. After that, for simple economic and artistic reasons, our great poets either went into film or returned, as in ages past, to songwriting.
Our great motion picture directors -- Coppola, Spielberg, and their peers (all whom are postwar babies who grew up in the golden years of television and Satyrday matinees) – are poets because through their art they make the world, not because they use a particular form. Instead of limiting themselves to traditional verse-based methods, these poets use the richest media available to most fully realize their vision and transmit it to their audience. Something similar can be said for our great songwriters, the difference being individual genius – the more auditory taking up music; the more visual, filmmaking.
One reason why poetry is in very good shape and pays very well today is that we have great poets who are making millions of dollars creating the world most of us more or less passively inhabit. The trick lies in recognizing where our poets are and what their poetry entails. The question is why the abandonment of spoken word poetry. Half of the answer has been given: a richer embodiment of artistic vision is possible with another toolset. The other half – the literally richer, economic half -- is money, fame, sex, and power.
Our best poets didn’t abandon verse simply for artistic reasons, despite valid ground for doing so. Instead, they were led to do so by a combination of artistic vision and worldly competition. Back in the day, when poets sang the tales of kings and conquerors, they competed against each other for places at court. They did so, as professionals, for pay and prestige. It also helped them get their songs out. In doing so, their work set the standards of the day, thereby making the world.
For an economic analysis of poetry, it doesn’t matter that today we tend to find more beauty and authenticity in the unconventional work of any era, or that most contributions to any “school” of poetry are mediocre. That’s what we expect, statistically. Instead, what matters is that a standard is set, and competition to exceed that mark and set a new standard ensues. Thomas Kuhn noted the same happens in the sciences. In both arenas, the rewards of winning are fame, fortune, sex, and power.
This is the simplest of economic and biology, and was case until the arrival the printing press. After that, growing literacy in the lower classes opened a new poetic market. Rather than having to master what filtered out of a stale court in order to move up and gain the chance to innovate, a poet could perform directly for the masses. The press launched a democratic revolution, in art as in politics, that cannot be overestimated. Initially invigorating, the democratic consciousness that literacy engendered is responsible for a large part of the low esteem in which verse is held today.
By the end of the 19th century, poetry was still a viable way to make a living, and one that brought the successful poet a reasonable measure of social esteem. Tennyson and Browning are examples. For that reason, it still drew talent. However, public education was spreading literacy far and wide, and poets and publishers took notice. There was money to be made, and it was far easier to turn five nickels than a quarter. A poetaster who might not have been published fifty or a hundred years earlier, but who could string a few salacious or sentimental rhymes together might earn as much as solid, second-tier poet who knew his metrics and allusions.
True, the coarser working-man’s poet might be fresh and authentic, giving voice to classes long kept mute. True, there might be real, fresh-hewn art here. Be that as it may, when those with long-honed skills find their skills outdated, they either grow bitter and starve as they are marginalized (literally forced to the barren margins) or they abandon their old field in favor of new, acquiring new skills as they go. So, when standards “fell”, much of our poetic talent looked elsewhere for employment.
They found in it in novels and drama, in radio and motion pictures. Literary talent moved to these forms earlier or later, but move it did, and it did so to get paid. So why does verse pay so poorly? The easy answer is that it gets paid what its worth, because without talented poets making good poetry, there’s little worth paying for, but this is circular. However, that circularity indicates the presence of a negative spiral, a sympathetic feedback loop that races, not quite to the bottom, but a mediocre steady state. Until something changes to draw talent back to verse, the situation will either get worse or remain in a period stagflation, a Keynesian equilibrium where all suffer.
The root cause of poetry’s economic demise is democracy. Not political democracy, or even a democracy of taste, but one of access. The simple fact is that not so long ago, poets needed demonstrable skill. They had to know rhymes and metrics and allusions. They had to be able to compose on the fly, like a jazz musician. They acquired these tools after long training, formal or informal. To some extent, this remains true today, but really only for those poets who’ve gone into singing, as the singer has to know a stock selection of cover tunes, and be able to perform them well enough for public approval. Because there are no publicly known “cover-poems” by which the public can measure a poet, all other versifiers (with the possible exception of slam artists) are in the same boat.
In other words, the man or woman on the street has – as far as anyone can tell – as much expertise in poetry as a real devotee of the craft: a native tongue, a literate brain, writing implements, and a little time. When “real” poetry looks like a sentence scrambled on the page, who can tell the difference between the hack and the pro? When “serious” poetry doesn’t sound “poetic”, and is darn near indecipherable who is the better poet, the office rhymer, or the MFA?
This is not a debate about the virtues of post-war poetry. There are none. It is what democracy of access means. When the man on the street feels he can do just as well, maybe better, than a “real” poet – and feels he has every right to think that way – why should he spend his hard earned cash on poetry? In this economic environment, very few will risk investing the bulk of their time, energy, and talent creating verse. The return is simply too low.
As a result, most of the talent flees elsewhere. This drives product quality down, and confirms the man-on-the-streets democratic notions. Those that stay tend to get defensive about their chosen medium, which puts a damper on creativity, and therefore quality. This happens to the few real talents, but even more so to those who moved up higher in the pecking order than they otherwise would have. They know instinctively that they are living atop a house of cards and get nasty when anyone attempts to address the emperor’s new clothes. They try to prop each other up with empty prizes, and restore both gates and gatekeepers using MFA programs, but certification never made a poet. Poets make themselves as they make the world.
What does this mean for poetry? Nothing, actually. Our poetic instincts are alive and well. The commercial jingle that’s easy to remember – that’s poetry. Maybe not good poetry, but more musical and easier to remember than anything out of a literary journal. For better or for worse, it helps make the world in a much more meaningful way that some opaque ramble in an obscure periodical read by very few ever will.
McDonalds creates more of the world with its “da-Dah, Dat-dat-Dah, I’m loving it” than any contemporary poem does, simply because it is memorable and applicable to a much wider range of people and situations, and has great allusive content. You can use it, when it impinges on your consciousness, as an honest expression of how you’re enjoying a beautiful morning, or as ironic commentary about corporate America. This richness of meaning, of manifold interpretation paired with melody and memorability, -- its mutability -- lends something poetic to a bit of advertising twaddle.
The same goes for that piece of rhymed office satire. It may galumph along, rose-red and violet-blue as it castrates the boss, but its author will be rewarded and remembered. Maybe she or he will get enough attention to keep writing, and eventually pen something pretty darn good for a wedding or a funeral, something that in a century two somebody will discover and anthologize.
For that matter, the horde of amateur internet poets puts the law of large numbers to work in favor of good verse. Enough man-hours, and something good will turn up . The trick will be finding it, but social networking may help. Of course, if it’s any good, it will likely be put to music and sold by the millions. Slam poetry is another sign of animal vitality. We don’t have to worry about poetry. It’s in our nature. We just have to look outside of convention to find it.
The root message here is that poets and poetry are relevant – they make the world, after all. They just don’t use naked verse to do it anymore. Verse poetry has reunited with song, in order to find its audience, change the world, and get paid. There is more real poetry in Gun’s & Roses “Sweet Child O Mine”, akin as it is to “Westron Wind” than anything written after Ginsburg’s “Howl”
If you don’t like that heavy metal ballad, pick a favorite from the Beatles or the Stones. Paul Simon’s “the bomb in baby carriage was wired to the radio” is better poetry than any I’ve read in Poetry these last three years, the proof being that I can remember it. If jazz is your thing, how about my all-time favorite “Beyond the Sea”? Need something a little grittier, listen to some early NWA or Public Enemy. I’ll put Michelle Shocked and Cheryl Crow against Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich any day.
Pick a famous band, from Aerosmith to ZZ Top, from Buddy Holly to Elvis to the Dixie Chicks, and you’ll find poetry. You’ll find it because out of all the bands out there – and like poets, there are thousands, these rose to the top against tough competition (unlike poets). These lyricists wrote for the court of public opinion, touched the heartstrings of millions, and were rewarded for it. Not extravagantly, mind you, but in keeping with what they provided. If they make millions, they really earn it. What’s the world worth?
This is true not only for the poets that practice accompanied verse, but those who mix it with cinema, or specialize in film. As multi-media artists, Laurie Anderson (Home of the Brave) or the Talking Heads (Stop Making Sense) are as good as any canonical poet, and for my money, offer the best poetry of the last quarter of the 20th century. Judy Garland may be saccharine in The Wizard of Oz, but she’s certainly as archetypal as Bogie was in Casablanca. I could go on as I did for the musicians, but surely you get the picture .
None will dispute that sex, fame, and fortune accompany musical or cinematic stardom, but what about power? Look at how Bono (U2) or any number of actors have parleyed celebrity status into positions at international conferences or on boards of directors for social action groups. World-making is serious business, and the real poets know it.
Poetry is relevant. Poetry is alive and well. Its social purpose is to create the world. It flows in the veins of the masses, across our airwaves and movie screens, and over the world-wide web. Poetry as an academic exercise among a cloistered order of journal contributors amounts to a ritualistic circle-jerking. Versification has become a sterile religious activity, divorced from the throb of life. As such, it is rightly shunned by those with talent, and consigned to poverty -- a condition which its devotees have adopted as a ascetic vow, in self-righteous pride.
The situation is almost the same in the world of journalism, as the democratizing power of the Internet – another technological change – puts amateurs on the same footing as professionals. Beyond this observation, I can't go as I simply don't know enough about the profession and economics of the news industry. But I think a comparison to poetry and its economic history might be valuable to journalists old and new.
Poetry is alive and well. It thrives and pays better than ever before despite – not because of – a proliferation of MFA programs, quarterly journals, and literary prizes. To understand this, we must recognize poetry for what it is in essence, and for what it is today. When we do so, we’ll see where our poets are, and what they’re doing to make so much money. We’ll also understand why this conflicts with conventional understanding, and how the rebirth of journalism will invigorate our verse, and so our world.
To begin, poetry means “making”. What we make with or through poetry is nothing less than our world. Traditionally, this has entailed ordering perception by ordering sounds, words, and ideas. Poetry is not the only creative approach to life, but unlike the graphic and plastic arts, because it uses words poetry deals with ideas more explicitly than any other art form. Poetry directly verbalizes things to which other arts give color, shape, and texture – elements which we describe and consciously understand through words applied after the fact.
The basic method of poetic ordering is repetition. If rhyme and rhythm are just the repetition of sounds and stresses in interwoven patterns, poetic repetition of words, phrases, and themes are a scaled-up version of the same practice. If we are that which we choose to repeat, repetitive poetry provides a handle to both individual and social identities. In other words, any poem can provide ideas about what we are or want to become as individuals. It can also provide ideas about how we might interact as members of a society, and what the shared values of that society are or should be. This is the link between journalism and poetry. Journalism documents life, so deals with “are”. Poetry deals with idealized life, and “should be”.
Poetic repetition exists within single poems, and among the poems of a tradition. That is, in any one poem a poet may use sounds, syllables, words, and phrases for poetic effect to help form and refine ideas. Those ideas, and even the effects used to create them, may then be repeated across poems, across time, even across traditions. This is how poetry makes the world. Making the world is a big part of poetry’s social utility. The other part is introducing a sense of adventure into it (this is explored in “On Poetry”).
The key realization about the economics of poetry is that poets are makers. Professional makers prefer to use the best tool for the job. Utility tends to be their guiding principle. Like their fellows in other crafts, they master the tools of their craft, refine both tools and technique, and when necessary for progress, discard old tools and ways in favor of new. Sometimes, the way forward is found by a return to beginnings, either by elaborating on an overlooked strain, or remixing several old ones into something new. In any event, a maker tends to be less sentimental than utilitarian regarding choice of tools. Significantly, sentimentality in poetry is widely and rightly derided as poor craftsmanship.
For ages, literally, from the Stone Age through the Victorian Age, poets made the world by transmitting their vision of it through the individual voice. Essentially, the only technological changes directly relevant to poetry over this broad stretch of time were the proliferation of musical instruments for accompaniment, the development of writing, and the invention of the printing press. Radio might have furthered poetry per se – and did, after a fashion -- but the quick arrival of “talking pictures” gave it stiff competition, and continues to do so today.
Motion pictures added picture to the voice and music of traditional poetry. For artists concerned with making the world, the opportunity to enrich their work by adding a whole new dimension was not to be missed. For artists concerned with envisioning a world, the chance to do so literally, by adding picture to word and song, had to be taken. Makers who seek to produce the highest quality work will use the best tools and materials available. The 20th century offered poets – makers – a new tool in cinema, and most of the best of them took it up. For evidence, consider how the radio play died with the advent of television as writing talent followed the money to Hollywood. Consider as well that today we quote lines from movie scripts, rather than lines from poems.
When this talent shift occurred would be hard to pinpoint exactly, but somewhere between the Great Depression and the end of the Second World War seems likely, with Yeats, Eliot, and Frost marking the end of the line of poetry as it’s generally conceived. After that, for simple economic and artistic reasons, our great poets either went into film or returned, as in ages past, to songwriting.
Our great motion picture directors -- Coppola, Spielberg, and their peers (all whom are postwar babies who grew up in the golden years of television and Satyrday matinees) – are poets because through their art they make the world, not because they use a particular form. Instead of limiting themselves to traditional verse-based methods, these poets use the richest media available to most fully realize their vision and transmit it to their audience. Something similar can be said for our great songwriters, the difference being individual genius – the more auditory taking up music; the more visual, filmmaking.
One reason why poetry is in very good shape and pays very well today is that we have great poets who are making millions of dollars creating the world most of us more or less passively inhabit. The trick lies in recognizing where our poets are and what their poetry entails. The question is why the abandonment of spoken word poetry. Half of the answer has been given: a richer embodiment of artistic vision is possible with another toolset. The other half – the literally richer, economic half -- is money, fame, sex, and power.
Our best poets didn’t abandon verse simply for artistic reasons, despite valid ground for doing so. Instead, they were led to do so by a combination of artistic vision and worldly competition. Back in the day, when poets sang the tales of kings and conquerors, they competed against each other for places at court. They did so, as professionals, for pay and prestige. It also helped them get their songs out. In doing so, their work set the standards of the day, thereby making the world.
For an economic analysis of poetry, it doesn’t matter that today we tend to find more beauty and authenticity in the unconventional work of any era, or that most contributions to any “school” of poetry are mediocre. That’s what we expect, statistically. Instead, what matters is that a standard is set, and competition to exceed that mark and set a new standard ensues. Thomas Kuhn noted the same happens in the sciences. In both arenas, the rewards of winning are fame, fortune, sex, and power.
This is the simplest of economic and biology, and was case until the arrival the printing press. After that, growing literacy in the lower classes opened a new poetic market. Rather than having to master what filtered out of a stale court in order to move up and gain the chance to innovate, a poet could perform directly for the masses. The press launched a democratic revolution, in art as in politics, that cannot be overestimated. Initially invigorating, the democratic consciousness that literacy engendered is responsible for a large part of the low esteem in which verse is held today.
By the end of the 19th century, poetry was still a viable way to make a living, and one that brought the successful poet a reasonable measure of social esteem. Tennyson and Browning are examples. For that reason, it still drew talent. However, public education was spreading literacy far and wide, and poets and publishers took notice. There was money to be made, and it was far easier to turn five nickels than a quarter. A poetaster who might not have been published fifty or a hundred years earlier, but who could string a few salacious or sentimental rhymes together might earn as much as solid, second-tier poet who knew his metrics and allusions.
True, the coarser working-man’s poet might be fresh and authentic, giving voice to classes long kept mute. True, there might be real, fresh-hewn art here. Be that as it may, when those with long-honed skills find their skills outdated, they either grow bitter and starve as they are marginalized (literally forced to the barren margins) or they abandon their old field in favor of new, acquiring new skills as they go. So, when standards “fell”, much of our poetic talent looked elsewhere for employment.
They found in it in novels and drama, in radio and motion pictures. Literary talent moved to these forms earlier or later, but move it did, and it did so to get paid. So why does verse pay so poorly? The easy answer is that it gets paid what its worth, because without talented poets making good poetry, there’s little worth paying for, but this is circular. However, that circularity indicates the presence of a negative spiral, a sympathetic feedback loop that races, not quite to the bottom, but a mediocre steady state. Until something changes to draw talent back to verse, the situation will either get worse or remain in a period stagflation, a Keynesian equilibrium where all suffer.
The root cause of poetry’s economic demise is democracy. Not political democracy, or even a democracy of taste, but one of access. The simple fact is that not so long ago, poets needed demonstrable skill. They had to know rhymes and metrics and allusions. They had to be able to compose on the fly, like a jazz musician. They acquired these tools after long training, formal or informal. To some extent, this remains true today, but really only for those poets who’ve gone into singing, as the singer has to know a stock selection of cover tunes, and be able to perform them well enough for public approval. Because there are no publicly known “cover-poems” by which the public can measure a poet, all other versifiers (with the possible exception of slam artists) are in the same boat.
In other words, the man or woman on the street has – as far as anyone can tell – as much expertise in poetry as a real devotee of the craft: a native tongue, a literate brain, writing implements, and a little time. When “real” poetry looks like a sentence scrambled on the page, who can tell the difference between the hack and the pro? When “serious” poetry doesn’t sound “poetic”, and is darn near indecipherable who is the better poet, the office rhymer, or the MFA?
This is not a debate about the virtues of post-war poetry. There are none. It is what democracy of access means. When the man on the street feels he can do just as well, maybe better, than a “real” poet – and feels he has every right to think that way – why should he spend his hard earned cash on poetry? In this economic environment, very few will risk investing the bulk of their time, energy, and talent creating verse. The return is simply too low.
As a result, most of the talent flees elsewhere. This drives product quality down, and confirms the man-on-the-streets democratic notions. Those that stay tend to get defensive about their chosen medium, which puts a damper on creativity, and therefore quality. This happens to the few real talents, but even more so to those who moved up higher in the pecking order than they otherwise would have. They know instinctively that they are living atop a house of cards and get nasty when anyone attempts to address the emperor’s new clothes. They try to prop each other up with empty prizes, and restore both gates and gatekeepers using MFA programs, but certification never made a poet. Poets make themselves as they make the world.
What does this mean for poetry? Nothing, actually. Our poetic instincts are alive and well. The commercial jingle that’s easy to remember – that’s poetry. Maybe not good poetry, but more musical and easier to remember than anything out of a literary journal. For better or for worse, it helps make the world in a much more meaningful way that some opaque ramble in an obscure periodical read by very few ever will.
McDonalds creates more of the world with its “da-Dah, Dat-dat-Dah, I’m loving it” than any contemporary poem does, simply because it is memorable and applicable to a much wider range of people and situations, and has great allusive content. You can use it, when it impinges on your consciousness, as an honest expression of how you’re enjoying a beautiful morning, or as ironic commentary about corporate America. This richness of meaning, of manifold interpretation paired with melody and memorability, -- its mutability -- lends something poetic to a bit of advertising twaddle.
The same goes for that piece of rhymed office satire. It may galumph along, rose-red and violet-blue as it castrates the boss, but its author will be rewarded and remembered. Maybe she or he will get enough attention to keep writing, and eventually pen something pretty darn good for a wedding or a funeral, something that in a century two somebody will discover and anthologize.
For that matter, the horde of amateur internet poets puts the law of large numbers to work in favor of good verse. Enough man-hours, and something good will turn up . The trick will be finding it, but social networking may help. Of course, if it’s any good, it will likely be put to music and sold by the millions. Slam poetry is another sign of animal vitality. We don’t have to worry about poetry. It’s in our nature. We just have to look outside of convention to find it.
The root message here is that poets and poetry are relevant – they make the world, after all. They just don’t use naked verse to do it anymore. Verse poetry has reunited with song, in order to find its audience, change the world, and get paid. There is more real poetry in Gun’s & Roses “Sweet Child O Mine”, akin as it is to “Westron Wind” than anything written after Ginsburg’s “Howl”
If you don’t like that heavy metal ballad, pick a favorite from the Beatles or the Stones. Paul Simon’s “the bomb in baby carriage was wired to the radio” is better poetry than any I’ve read in Poetry these last three years, the proof being that I can remember it. If jazz is your thing, how about my all-time favorite “Beyond the Sea”? Need something a little grittier, listen to some early NWA or Public Enemy. I’ll put Michelle Shocked and Cheryl Crow against Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich any day.
Pick a famous band, from Aerosmith to ZZ Top, from Buddy Holly to Elvis to the Dixie Chicks, and you’ll find poetry. You’ll find it because out of all the bands out there – and like poets, there are thousands, these rose to the top against tough competition (unlike poets). These lyricists wrote for the court of public opinion, touched the heartstrings of millions, and were rewarded for it. Not extravagantly, mind you, but in keeping with what they provided. If they make millions, they really earn it. What’s the world worth?
This is true not only for the poets that practice accompanied verse, but those who mix it with cinema, or specialize in film. As multi-media artists, Laurie Anderson (Home of the Brave) or the Talking Heads (Stop Making Sense) are as good as any canonical poet, and for my money, offer the best poetry of the last quarter of the 20th century. Judy Garland may be saccharine in The Wizard of Oz, but she’s certainly as archetypal as Bogie was in Casablanca. I could go on as I did for the musicians, but surely you get the picture .
None will dispute that sex, fame, and fortune accompany musical or cinematic stardom, but what about power? Look at how Bono (U2) or any number of actors have parleyed celebrity status into positions at international conferences or on boards of directors for social action groups. World-making is serious business, and the real poets know it.
Poetry is relevant. Poetry is alive and well. Its social purpose is to create the world. It flows in the veins of the masses, across our airwaves and movie screens, and over the world-wide web. Poetry as an academic exercise among a cloistered order of journal contributors amounts to a ritualistic circle-jerking. Versification has become a sterile religious activity, divorced from the throb of life. As such, it is rightly shunned by those with talent, and consigned to poverty -- a condition which its devotees have adopted as a ascetic vow, in self-righteous pride.
The situation is almost the same in the world of journalism, as the democratizing power of the Internet – another technological change – puts amateurs on the same footing as professionals. Beyond this observation, I can't go as I simply don't know enough about the profession and economics of the news industry. But I think a comparison to poetry and its economic history might be valuable to journalists old and new.
The Curse of Finity
The Curse of Finity
The bliss of finity, like any discipline or intoxicant, is dangerous. The danger lies in its ubiquity, its ease of application. This results in extension and over-use. When that happens, boundaries disappear. In practice, this threat manifests as dissipation of effort. Tempted by a plethora of finite tasks whose tidy resolution can become addictive, we risk frittering ourselves away on trivia. The trick is to balance the thrill of near-omnipotence in small tasks with the thrill of being overwhelmed by large ones. Great things can come of attention to detail, but only if we exclude most if not all the other small demands on our time and attention. If we pay attention to lots of small matters, we have nothing to invest in large ones, except regret.
Personally, I fight and lose the balance battle frequently. As you may imagine, allegiance to the mirage-like appeal of the timeless infinity of art is easily overwhelmed by the alluring demand of the finite mundane. The yard, the house, the critters, the houseplants, the garden, the housework –laundry, meals, etc consume my day. Family takes its share. Suddenly, the day is done and I’ve written not one word. Yeats wrote that all things could tempt him from the craft of verse. Ain’t it the truth. The bliss of finity is cursed treasure, one whose infinity of appealing forms can steal the souls of all but the strongest pilgrims.
I think that the curse of finity may be partly behind our cultural dismissal of poetry. In other times, when the world was clearly bounded, and god was in his heaven, the liberty of infinity was pleasurable to consider. Time without end. The everlasting life of the immortal soul. These were ways out of a celestial prison, ones that the repetition, the rhyme, and the rolling meter of poetry helped convey. As a result, poetry was popular.
Today, the situation is different. Confronted with the infinity of the universe and the immense scope of problems in a populous world, finity beckons and we prefer prose. We do so because whether novel or non-fiction, the work itself is finite, self-contained, with a beginning and an end. This closure is at least as comforting as the heightening of reality that attention to storyline or fact pattern provides to readers assaulted by the need to reconcile their appreciation of the recent fruits of science with a long cultural allegiance to religion. In other words, religion once infused the world with meaning. Today, science says this is all there is: you must provide meaning yourself. Prose fiction and non-fiction helps fill that gap by heightening reality as omnipotent authors edit the clutter and assign importance for us. The fact that they’ve always done this – somebody wrote the sacred texts – is not inconsequential, but that aside must wait.
Another reason we prefer prose today is that the babble of prose dampens the echo of its rhetoric. This keeps it from rolling down time’s infinite corridors, taking us with it. Because prose seldom sweeps us off our feet, its safe and comforting in an unsettling millennium. Yes, there are evocative prose works – the Gettysburg Address springs to mind – but almost all are very nearly prose poems (an oxymoron whose existence I deny) that deal with big questions, matters of enduring human import.
That’s what good poetry does too. A poem may be finite, it may start and end on the same page, with the same sounds even. But it rings like a bell. And being small, it can be infinitely tinkered with. Prose you can slap down, rough into shape, and let be in good wabi-sabi fashion. A poem is much more disciplined finity, one that demands perfection or at least its approach. In a busy, trivia-filled world, that sort of commitment is as hard to justify as it is summon. So poetry suffers. And we do too.
The bliss of finity, like any discipline or intoxicant, is dangerous. The danger lies in its ubiquity, its ease of application. This results in extension and over-use. When that happens, boundaries disappear. In practice, this threat manifests as dissipation of effort. Tempted by a plethora of finite tasks whose tidy resolution can become addictive, we risk frittering ourselves away on trivia. The trick is to balance the thrill of near-omnipotence in small tasks with the thrill of being overwhelmed by large ones. Great things can come of attention to detail, but only if we exclude most if not all the other small demands on our time and attention. If we pay attention to lots of small matters, we have nothing to invest in large ones, except regret.
Personally, I fight and lose the balance battle frequently. As you may imagine, allegiance to the mirage-like appeal of the timeless infinity of art is easily overwhelmed by the alluring demand of the finite mundane. The yard, the house, the critters, the houseplants, the garden, the housework –laundry, meals, etc consume my day. Family takes its share. Suddenly, the day is done and I’ve written not one word. Yeats wrote that all things could tempt him from the craft of verse. Ain’t it the truth. The bliss of finity is cursed treasure, one whose infinity of appealing forms can steal the souls of all but the strongest pilgrims.
I think that the curse of finity may be partly behind our cultural dismissal of poetry. In other times, when the world was clearly bounded, and god was in his heaven, the liberty of infinity was pleasurable to consider. Time without end. The everlasting life of the immortal soul. These were ways out of a celestial prison, ones that the repetition, the rhyme, and the rolling meter of poetry helped convey. As a result, poetry was popular.
Today, the situation is different. Confronted with the infinity of the universe and the immense scope of problems in a populous world, finity beckons and we prefer prose. We do so because whether novel or non-fiction, the work itself is finite, self-contained, with a beginning and an end. This closure is at least as comforting as the heightening of reality that attention to storyline or fact pattern provides to readers assaulted by the need to reconcile their appreciation of the recent fruits of science with a long cultural allegiance to religion. In other words, religion once infused the world with meaning. Today, science says this is all there is: you must provide meaning yourself. Prose fiction and non-fiction helps fill that gap by heightening reality as omnipotent authors edit the clutter and assign importance for us. The fact that they’ve always done this – somebody wrote the sacred texts – is not inconsequential, but that aside must wait.
Another reason we prefer prose today is that the babble of prose dampens the echo of its rhetoric. This keeps it from rolling down time’s infinite corridors, taking us with it. Because prose seldom sweeps us off our feet, its safe and comforting in an unsettling millennium. Yes, there are evocative prose works – the Gettysburg Address springs to mind – but almost all are very nearly prose poems (an oxymoron whose existence I deny) that deal with big questions, matters of enduring human import.
That’s what good poetry does too. A poem may be finite, it may start and end on the same page, with the same sounds even. But it rings like a bell. And being small, it can be infinitely tinkered with. Prose you can slap down, rough into shape, and let be in good wabi-sabi fashion. A poem is much more disciplined finity, one that demands perfection or at least its approach. In a busy, trivia-filled world, that sort of commitment is as hard to justify as it is summon. So poetry suffers. And we do too.
The Bliss of Finity
The Bliss of Finity
Early on it was creeping Charlie. The last two years it was violets. Before that, morning glory and flax. Every year I’m presented with an eradication project, a vegetable threat to the bluegrass monoculture of my yard. Yes, I fully comprehend the many ironies here: Mr Systems, Mr Naturalist, Mr Dissent who hates to mow and once had his west yard reduced to patches of wildflowers has fallen prey to convention, assimilated by the Borg of petrochemical society.
Maybe, maybe not. The lawn has become my little Zen project. I keep it weed free by growing it long, mowing as little as possible, and weeding by hand. I let the grass outcompete most weeds, but lend a hand when needed. In return, my little Bluegrass Nation cools my yard.
This year – and probably every year from now on -- its maple seedlings now that the trees I planted for each daughter have, like the daughters, come into bloom. Long grass is good, strong grass, but it’s also a great starter bed for maple seeds. So once again I’m patrolling my yard one square meter at a time, this time plucking trees by the handful like Giant John.
The maples, at least, require nothing but fingers for removal. That said, there is something fun about weeding with a K-bar or tomahawk, my tools of choice with the violets. It’s fun to be that guy, the one who weeds and waves with a weapon. But something more than the fun of unintended intimidation keeps me in the yard: the allure of the finite, and its shadow, the illusion of omnipotence.
You see, weeding a lawn of violets or maple seedlings may at first blush seem like a fool’s errand, and to some quixotic extent, it is. Every year, after all, its something. Maybe the same weed, maybe not, but the challenge of the earth’s automatic fecundity never ends. That’s why maintenance of a monoculture – any monoculture – is an illusion of omnipotence. Within that illusion, however, lies heaven.
This is true only as long as a proper humility provides constraint, for with bounds comes the prospect of perfection. In life, as inside my yard, only so many weeds can grow – their number is finite. In theory, therefore, the perfect lawn is an attainable goal, one whose worth is measure by the effort needed to achieve it, as is true of every spiritual quest. But let pride grow, try to substitute the universal for the individual, and the illusion fades. As it does, the bliss of finity recedes like the end of a rainbow, a spiritual Frisbee spinning forever out of reach. The bliss of finity is the bliss of discipline – a discipline of leisure.
Early on it was creeping Charlie. The last two years it was violets. Before that, morning glory and flax. Every year I’m presented with an eradication project, a vegetable threat to the bluegrass monoculture of my yard. Yes, I fully comprehend the many ironies here: Mr Systems, Mr Naturalist, Mr Dissent who hates to mow and once had his west yard reduced to patches of wildflowers has fallen prey to convention, assimilated by the Borg of petrochemical society.
Maybe, maybe not. The lawn has become my little Zen project. I keep it weed free by growing it long, mowing as little as possible, and weeding by hand. I let the grass outcompete most weeds, but lend a hand when needed. In return, my little Bluegrass Nation cools my yard.
This year – and probably every year from now on -- its maple seedlings now that the trees I planted for each daughter have, like the daughters, come into bloom. Long grass is good, strong grass, but it’s also a great starter bed for maple seeds. So once again I’m patrolling my yard one square meter at a time, this time plucking trees by the handful like Giant John.
The maples, at least, require nothing but fingers for removal. That said, there is something fun about weeding with a K-bar or tomahawk, my tools of choice with the violets. It’s fun to be that guy, the one who weeds and waves with a weapon. But something more than the fun of unintended intimidation keeps me in the yard: the allure of the finite, and its shadow, the illusion of omnipotence.
You see, weeding a lawn of violets or maple seedlings may at first blush seem like a fool’s errand, and to some quixotic extent, it is. Every year, after all, its something. Maybe the same weed, maybe not, but the challenge of the earth’s automatic fecundity never ends. That’s why maintenance of a monoculture – any monoculture – is an illusion of omnipotence. Within that illusion, however, lies heaven.
This is true only as long as a proper humility provides constraint, for with bounds comes the prospect of perfection. In life, as inside my yard, only so many weeds can grow – their number is finite. In theory, therefore, the perfect lawn is an attainable goal, one whose worth is measure by the effort needed to achieve it, as is true of every spiritual quest. But let pride grow, try to substitute the universal for the individual, and the illusion fades. As it does, the bliss of finity recedes like the end of a rainbow, a spiritual Frisbee spinning forever out of reach. The bliss of finity is the bliss of discipline – a discipline of leisure.
Why I Write
Why I Write
If a tree falls in a forest where there is no one to hear it, does it make a sound?
Growing up, I never saw the sense of that question. That it was irrelevant and immaterial seemed obvious. The tree did whatever it was going to do: live, die, fall. It didn’t care if it had an audience or not. It was too busy being a tree, maybe the best tree it could be, maybe not. Maybe it hoped to be an example to other trees, either of exception or of conformity. Maybe it tried to fall quietly, maybe loudly, but I expect it just fell naturally, as a tree should. Until recently, this is how I decided I would live my life.
As a writer, I have not felt compelled to publish and advertise my particular point of view. The choice of infinitive reveals why: I felt no need to sell anything, particularly myself. To do so – to speak publicly and join the discourse of society -- seemed to cost more than it brought in return. Selling myself seemed nothing less than human trafficking, all the worse because the trade was not for a brute body, but a human consciousness and its time. Better to live simply, as a tree, and let my example speak for itself. If it went unnoticed, so be it. There was no reason to privilege my perspective. I have no corner on how best for mankind to live. I know only how best for me to live, and imperfect knowledge it is. Silence seemed to be the sum and substance of a humility born of self-confidence. Yet now I would publish. Why?
I do so for several reasons. First, a little education is a wonderful thing. With a ray of economics illuminating much that had been dark, a new understanding of commerce and its benefits, broadly imagined, emboldens me to venture into the marketplace of ideas. Second, writing helps a man clarify his thought. Third, it records that he did in fact think. In a world full of getting and begetting, few manage more than an animal existence. Fourth, this is what I am or would be. A man cannot be a writer without offering something to the public, sooner or later. Fifth, I am not trying to sell my self so much as I offer a mapping tool. Do not assume some production-line mentality, I say with no small irony; instead, find your own with this handy gadget. Sixth, action gives substance, clarity, and meaning to words and vice-versa. If I believe there is too little skepticism of society, and too little faith in the individual. I would be wrong not to say so. A silent example is as insufficient as empty rhetoric. Seventh, I am trying to sell a book. I do so in order to better provide for my family, ironically subordinating thought to biology. Eighth, I do so shamelessly because regardless of my disenchantment with popular culture and its conventional wisdom, I am a member of society. Even as a critic I fill a social role and acquire a social label, whether I like it or not. I cannot succeed in that role if I fail to contribute to “The Great Conversation” of social discourse. Ninth, being a social animal, I would like to associate with others like me, and be recognized by them as one of the breed.
This last is the heart of the matter. I believe myself to be an independent, critical thinker. I admire those whom I believe to be just that. The only way to prove myself their peer is to differentiate myself from the crowd by publishing something worthy of their notice. So the root of my human behavior is really nothing more than herd behavior, and signal creation and recognition. Single cell organisms can do this much.
But they can’t write. Of all human activity, the activity that truly separates us from the beasts is record-keeping. We create artifacts, intentional records of our existence. I do not mean mere tools, for these are not meant to preserve our identity over time. Obsolete tools are no more than industrials fossils, as subject to chance for erasure or preservation as footprints on a riverbed. What I refer to is art – graphic or plastic.
Performance art is the song of a bird, the growth of a tree, the leap of a dancer, or the life of a man trying to quietly live a craftsman ideal. These performances may be nearly perfect. Through natural selection and differential reproduction they may indirectly contribute a more beautiful world, or they may not. They may inspire the emulation of fellow creatures and so directly contribute to a more beautiful world, or not. They may do so with or without credit, and their contribution may be distorted and subject to change so that very shortly very little if anything can be attributed to them. Yet on they go, performing their show – song, growth, dance, or craft – happily, contentedly, humbly – unobtrusive as a tree in a forest.
Plastic art, on the other hand, asserts itself more directly, more loudly, across time. Born of pride, material art dares to challenge the gods and succeeding generations. It says, like the mark on the wall or picture in the cave, “I leapt this high or killed this many. I bet you cannot and dare you to try.” Art attempts to fix the vision and transmit it, unaltered, free from mutation and exempt from natural selection. Art insists on attribution. It seeks to establish not only individual identity, but to proscribe social territory by setting the grounds and rules of social discourse. Using words, pictures, shapes, art states what is, or by exclusion, what is not fit for consideration. In another idiom, art lays out the standards of the breed. In doing so, it creates the world.
This colossal arrogance, this cosmic pride, defines our species. So, to be fully human, I write. This amounts to saying that is my nature to do so. If that is the case, then there is no difference between my writing and the growth, or fall, of a tree. I have come to believe that this is not inconsistency because all things seem to contain their opposites. This seems so because we cannot capture all of existence with any one grammar or vocabulary. However we describe, draw, or shape something, it could also be described by what we have left out, hence its opposite. So I write in accordance with nature, and at the same time, in defiance of it.
Let me close by updating the opening conundrum for the twenty-first century: if a book is published and not read by a politically or statistically significant portion of the world’s population, was anything said? We must wait a thousand years or so to find out. After all, with imperfect preservation, who knows if we have any of Euripides best work? As I am as likely to be read in a century or two whether I write or not, I may as well write if it pleases me to spend my time so performing, just as you, gentle reader, may waste your time reading.
If a tree falls in a forest where there is no one to hear it, does it make a sound?
Growing up, I never saw the sense of that question. That it was irrelevant and immaterial seemed obvious. The tree did whatever it was going to do: live, die, fall. It didn’t care if it had an audience or not. It was too busy being a tree, maybe the best tree it could be, maybe not. Maybe it hoped to be an example to other trees, either of exception or of conformity. Maybe it tried to fall quietly, maybe loudly, but I expect it just fell naturally, as a tree should. Until recently, this is how I decided I would live my life.
As a writer, I have not felt compelled to publish and advertise my particular point of view. The choice of infinitive reveals why: I felt no need to sell anything, particularly myself. To do so – to speak publicly and join the discourse of society -- seemed to cost more than it brought in return. Selling myself seemed nothing less than human trafficking, all the worse because the trade was not for a brute body, but a human consciousness and its time. Better to live simply, as a tree, and let my example speak for itself. If it went unnoticed, so be it. There was no reason to privilege my perspective. I have no corner on how best for mankind to live. I know only how best for me to live, and imperfect knowledge it is. Silence seemed to be the sum and substance of a humility born of self-confidence. Yet now I would publish. Why?
I do so for several reasons. First, a little education is a wonderful thing. With a ray of economics illuminating much that had been dark, a new understanding of commerce and its benefits, broadly imagined, emboldens me to venture into the marketplace of ideas. Second, writing helps a man clarify his thought. Third, it records that he did in fact think. In a world full of getting and begetting, few manage more than an animal existence. Fourth, this is what I am or would be. A man cannot be a writer without offering something to the public, sooner or later. Fifth, I am not trying to sell my self so much as I offer a mapping tool. Do not assume some production-line mentality, I say with no small irony; instead, find your own with this handy gadget. Sixth, action gives substance, clarity, and meaning to words and vice-versa. If I believe there is too little skepticism of society, and too little faith in the individual. I would be wrong not to say so. A silent example is as insufficient as empty rhetoric. Seventh, I am trying to sell a book. I do so in order to better provide for my family, ironically subordinating thought to biology. Eighth, I do so shamelessly because regardless of my disenchantment with popular culture and its conventional wisdom, I am a member of society. Even as a critic I fill a social role and acquire a social label, whether I like it or not. I cannot succeed in that role if I fail to contribute to “The Great Conversation” of social discourse. Ninth, being a social animal, I would like to associate with others like me, and be recognized by them as one of the breed.
This last is the heart of the matter. I believe myself to be an independent, critical thinker. I admire those whom I believe to be just that. The only way to prove myself their peer is to differentiate myself from the crowd by publishing something worthy of their notice. So the root of my human behavior is really nothing more than herd behavior, and signal creation and recognition. Single cell organisms can do this much.
But they can’t write. Of all human activity, the activity that truly separates us from the beasts is record-keeping. We create artifacts, intentional records of our existence. I do not mean mere tools, for these are not meant to preserve our identity over time. Obsolete tools are no more than industrials fossils, as subject to chance for erasure or preservation as footprints on a riverbed. What I refer to is art – graphic or plastic.
Performance art is the song of a bird, the growth of a tree, the leap of a dancer, or the life of a man trying to quietly live a craftsman ideal. These performances may be nearly perfect. Through natural selection and differential reproduction they may indirectly contribute a more beautiful world, or they may not. They may inspire the emulation of fellow creatures and so directly contribute to a more beautiful world, or not. They may do so with or without credit, and their contribution may be distorted and subject to change so that very shortly very little if anything can be attributed to them. Yet on they go, performing their show – song, growth, dance, or craft – happily, contentedly, humbly – unobtrusive as a tree in a forest.
Plastic art, on the other hand, asserts itself more directly, more loudly, across time. Born of pride, material art dares to challenge the gods and succeeding generations. It says, like the mark on the wall or picture in the cave, “I leapt this high or killed this many. I bet you cannot and dare you to try.” Art attempts to fix the vision and transmit it, unaltered, free from mutation and exempt from natural selection. Art insists on attribution. It seeks to establish not only individual identity, but to proscribe social territory by setting the grounds and rules of social discourse. Using words, pictures, shapes, art states what is, or by exclusion, what is not fit for consideration. In another idiom, art lays out the standards of the breed. In doing so, it creates the world.
This colossal arrogance, this cosmic pride, defines our species. So, to be fully human, I write. This amounts to saying that is my nature to do so. If that is the case, then there is no difference between my writing and the growth, or fall, of a tree. I have come to believe that this is not inconsistency because all things seem to contain their opposites. This seems so because we cannot capture all of existence with any one grammar or vocabulary. However we describe, draw, or shape something, it could also be described by what we have left out, hence its opposite. So I write in accordance with nature, and at the same time, in defiance of it.
Let me close by updating the opening conundrum for the twenty-first century: if a book is published and not read by a politically or statistically significant portion of the world’s population, was anything said? We must wait a thousand years or so to find out. After all, with imperfect preservation, who knows if we have any of Euripides best work? As I am as likely to be read in a century or two whether I write or not, I may as well write if it pleases me to spend my time so performing, just as you, gentle reader, may waste your time reading.
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Welcome to The View from Bogota. TVFB is my personal blog. You'll find diverse essays, many about applied leisure. You'll find poetry and politics and commentary on the news of the day. You might even find working drafts of novels and plays.
Why am I keeping a public journal? Why not exercise my right to privacy and keep this stuff to myself? I figure its like talking to yourself aloud in public. Few hear and nobody listens. Until you become a good enough orator to hold a crowd. That's all about practice, and so's this blog.
Yes, I'm sure this can be used against me, especially in the job market. That's OK. Consider it my personal declaration of liberty. The only way to be a writer is to write. One cost of writing is not doing something else, like having another job. So I guess this launching this blog and my others -- Better,Stronger,Safer and The Discipline of Leisure -- amounts to pruning my decision tree.
So feel free to eavesdrop on my mumbling. Just beware of falling branches. If you like what you hear, pass it on. If not, don't. Either way, feel free to engage in a little dialogue with me. I'd enjoy it. More soon. Be well.
Why am I keeping a public journal? Why not exercise my right to privacy and keep this stuff to myself? I figure its like talking to yourself aloud in public. Few hear and nobody listens. Until you become a good enough orator to hold a crowd. That's all about practice, and so's this blog.
Yes, I'm sure this can be used against me, especially in the job market. That's OK. Consider it my personal declaration of liberty. The only way to be a writer is to write. One cost of writing is not doing something else, like having another job. So I guess this launching this blog and my others -- Better,Stronger,Safer and The Discipline of Leisure -- amounts to pruning my decision tree.
So feel free to eavesdrop on my mumbling. Just beware of falling branches. If you like what you hear, pass it on. If not, don't. Either way, feel free to engage in a little dialogue with me. I'd enjoy it. More soon. Be well.
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