If "Character is what (we) are in the dark" (as has been proposed by Dwight Moody and Lord John Whorfin), then it is also what we are when no one is looking and we are completely free to manage our own time.
Are you reading this from the northeastern United States? If so (and my statistics say it's highly likely that you are), you have likely spent some portion of the past 24 hours pinned to your house due to Stormystorm* Nemo.
Are you a writer, either professional or hobbyist? If so (and my statistics say it's highly likely you are, unless you're my mother. Hi there, Mom!), you have therefore had an opportunity spend some time with your craft. How you used that time may be a good indication of where you are in your current project, in your writing process, or even in your progression (career?) as a writer. How did you make use of this bonus time?
Did you write? Though it may be the choice for many people, it may not be as obvious as you might think. There are writers who insist that inspiration has to strike to make writing time productive in the least; pinned to your house, wondering if you were stocked up enough on milk and eggs to last you through the weekend, may not be conducive to inspiration. Other folks are regimented in their writing to the point where it is difficult to make ready quickly enough to use unplanned time productively. If you are able to open the spigot on demand, this could have been a great opportunity for you.
Was this prime editing time for you? Editing is traditionally the third-least favorite activity** for a writer. Are you the kind who sees bonus time as a "sign" to get to this distasteful task? The kind to gird yourself with a grunt of "Well, now I have no excuse not to..." and break out the red pen? Interestingly, I find people are very generous applying energy to editing other people's work, but are reluctant to spend it on their own. Partly, I suppose, this is because the task feels like looking backwards, when we tend to want to put the "finished" work behind us and move on to new work. But it's also that the task is much, much harder for us to do ourselves (Faulkner warned us we must delete what we like most in our writings). So how can we use this time to improve our work?
Technology + time = connection. As long as you had power, did you reach out into the great online poetry community to find kindred writers to commiserate with and support you in your efforts? Post to some poets' Facebook Timelines? Respond to some overdue correspondence tasks? Writing is an isolating experience - it's just you and the words - and sometimes we need a reminder that our poems mean nothing in a drawer on on a thumb drive, and that we need the context of other artists to bring out the best in ourselves (and if you're lucky, to find a good proofreader and an honest mentor).
Research comes more naturally to some of us, especially in a rare bit of unstrcutured time. With the plethora of places and ways to publish available today, I think some poets have gotten a little spoiled (careless?) in their submission practice. It wasn't all that long ago that finding and sibmitting to a new publisher was a week's-long process and a long wait for response - find a journal, order a sample copy by postal mail, wait for it, study it when it arrives, craft and send a submission by postal mail, wait 6 months, repeat. With Submittable and such, there's a tendency to rush a submission in because it's so easy, and feedback is so quick from newer journals. Not surprisingly, this is where my energy drifted (pardon the snow-pun***). I searched my twitter feed for journals new to me, read some online archives , ordered a couple of copies, and prepped a submission.
Of course, for so many of us the greatest luxury in found time is to use it to read. I don't know a poet who doesn't have a stack of journals and books awaiting an opportunity to dig into them. If you're like me, you have a book on your nightstand, one in your briefcase, two on the coffee table, one by the television, and two in your "in case of emergency" overnight bag. And three in the cloud. With this extra time, did you invest in an unknown author? Crack the spine on a new book you've been aching to read? Revisit an old classic? You can file this activity under any of the above, by the way.
So what did you do with this time? Ask yourself this: Was the activity you gravitated to someplace you needed to spend some time? Or was it where you were comfortable working? If it was both, well, God bless. But if it didn't serve your needs as a writer, well.... think about what that's trying to tell you.
While these unexpected pauses are great and let us (if we are disciplined enough!) capitalize with a little bolus of output, they usually ends in a rapid ramp-up in the work we have been freed from by the distraction. As for me, I'm off to shovel.
I hope you enjoy your time this weekend.
* - I'm fed up with Megastorm! Superstorm! Snowmageddon! How about you?
** - just ahead of multiple molar extraction and appearing before the IRS.
*** - I promised myself no more than one in any communication I make today.
Saturday, February 9, 2013
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Poetry and.... Change
By now you've of course read Washington Post writer Alexandra Petri's column "Is Poetry Dead?" There has already been sufficient vitriolic response to that column (as there always is when the question is asked - which I find is just about biennially, timed perfectly out of phase with the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival). David Bespiel's response was the best I've read, other than Petri's own excellent follow-up column. I trust (hope?*) the flap is behind us, but now that our adrenaline has subsided and our patella tendons returned to their rest state, we have an an opportunity to look again at what Ms. Petri was saying. And as is usually the case when someone raises this prickly question, she makes some excellent observations. Fellow poetry practitioners, let's take a look at what she had to say.
Petri posits that "You can tell that a medium is still vital by posing the question: Can it change anything?" That seems pretty reasonable to me. She acknowledges her own medium - print journalism - has a suspect future, saying that "(if) poetry is dead, we are in the next ward over, wheezing noisily, with our family gathered around looking concerned and asking about our stereos." In the past few months, we've seen Newsweek give up its print edition, and here in NJ the largest daily newspaper just announced another prince increase/content decrease combination. If print journalism is losing out to online journalism, it's not unreasonable to speculate poetry should be feeling the same pain.
But there is a key flaw in the comparison: Newsweek lost its traditional audience to other sources of similar content. People who had been turning to the magazine for news commentary were turning other places, and Newsweek decided, sensibly, to focus its energy on competing more directly with those other places. But has poetry been losing its audience? Actually, technology has done just the opposite for poetry: online publication has created more opportunity to read poetry and enabled innovations like the Motion Poem. Additionally, the performance poetry scene continues to thrive and attract investment from nontraditional places (for example, the New York Knicks Poetry Slam Program).
Now, I'm not saying all these poetry interactions are necessarily good poetry, but I think it proves the audience is there, even growing into places it wasn't reaching (or didn't exist) 30 years ago, so the analogy to print media doesn't work. Petri continues, proposing that a plethora of bad poetry (or a low percentage of meaningful poetry) might also suggest the death of the form. She says "I think what we mean by poetry is a limp and fangless thing. Poetry has gone from being something that you did in order to Write Your Name Large Across the Sky and sound your barbaric yawp and generally Shake Things Up to a very carefully gated medium that requires years of study and apprenticeship in order to produce meticulous, perfect, golden lines that up to ten people will ever voluntarily read."
Well, yes. I think she has a good point here, one that has been debated for at least as long as I've been writing and collecting my poems. Much of what people pass off as poetry is weakly constructed, confessional fluff, and most credible poets agree on that. And there is a fairly well known divide between those who think an academic credential is necessary to poetry and those who think that same credential is a creativity-killing assimilation process. Both are right. In poetry (or biology, or economics), extra years of study and vetting by those skilled in the art provides peer review, practica, and understanding you could not get on your own. And that is likely to homogenize the field, exposing more poets to more "recognized" poets, creating more poems which call upon similar theory history - in a completely self-aware way, if the process has worked. But the alternative is more poets continuing to explore the same space that other poets have explored before; you risk eliminating the infrequent outlier genius but raise the overall quality of output. My analogy is this: If we didn't teach physics in college, at least one scientist a day would attempt to publish Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation. People would work hard and to great personal satisfaction and the flow of the science would dry up. Teaching the science to all who practice means we're free to explore other spaces within it - if we are creative enough to do so.
One of the arguments made against Petri (and whenever this topic is debated) is that with so many people writing poetry, how can it be dead? During the aftermath of the column, she quite rationally tweeted "Look, I love poetry, I've inhaled, I was an English major, the works. And I know Is It Dead Yet? essays are, er, not un-hack, shall we say./But I do want to hear a better case for poetry than "I do it! And mine's great!"." Again, she's right, and credible poets don't disagree. I think it's wonderful that so many people write poetry and want to share it. But those who write it without reading it are only stoking "poetry is obsolete" fire. Listen: Twitter will begin to die the day people stop retweeting, because it means people have stopped reading other people's tweets. Until then, it may be overused and largely vacuous, but it's still contributing something that cannot be found anywhere else.
Of course, Petri comes to all these conclusions herself, and one realizes she must have started with them in mind. She adds
"And whenever people say this about journalism, they note that people have an insatiable hunger for news. Journalism in its present form may not continue, but journalism will. It will have to. Otherwise where will the news come from?
And this might be the silver lining for poets. The kind of news you get from poems, as William Carlos Williams has it, must come from somewhere. And there is a similar hunger for poetry that persists. We get it in diluted doses in song lyrics. Song lyrics are incomplete poems, as Sondheim notes in the book of his own. If it is complete on the page, it makes a shoddy lyric. But there is still wonderful music to be found in those words. We get it in rap. If we really want to read it, it is everywhere. Poetry, taken back to its roots, is just the process of making — and making you listen."
Which is the rub. The "process of making" requires craft (taken as a knowledge of what works and what doesn't, who you're trying to reach, and knowing what you want to say... which can be acquired through either education or practice as long as either is applied with the diligent and sincere collection of feedback) and content (whether narrative or lyric, topical or ethereal, formal or conversational, personal or persona). If the poem - or the poet - has nothing interesting to say, there is no art. And where there is neither art not interest, no one can be reached... or changed.
Back, then, to the original question: "Can it change anything?" Ask this about the poems you love. Have they affected the way you think in some way? Are you more aware of something now than before you first read them? When you share them, do they raise a response in people who are reading them for the first time? When you discuss them, do they provide something meaningful to talk about, leading you in directions that sometimes surprise you? When you write them, do they end in places that challenge you to find your way back to where you started? Good poems will do these things. And it is these poems that will (continue to) keep poetry alive.
* - Petri herself tweeted: "remind me the next time I criticize a thing that it should be a thing whose practitioners are not noted for their wordcraft." People who pride themselves on their speaking are not wont to shut up.
Petri posits that "You can tell that a medium is still vital by posing the question: Can it change anything?" That seems pretty reasonable to me. She acknowledges her own medium - print journalism - has a suspect future, saying that "(if) poetry is dead, we are in the next ward over, wheezing noisily, with our family gathered around looking concerned and asking about our stereos." In the past few months, we've seen Newsweek give up its print edition, and here in NJ the largest daily newspaper just announced another prince increase/content decrease combination. If print journalism is losing out to online journalism, it's not unreasonable to speculate poetry should be feeling the same pain.
But there is a key flaw in the comparison: Newsweek lost its traditional audience to other sources of similar content. People who had been turning to the magazine for news commentary were turning other places, and Newsweek decided, sensibly, to focus its energy on competing more directly with those other places. But has poetry been losing its audience? Actually, technology has done just the opposite for poetry: online publication has created more opportunity to read poetry and enabled innovations like the Motion Poem. Additionally, the performance poetry scene continues to thrive and attract investment from nontraditional places (for example, the New York Knicks Poetry Slam Program).
Now, I'm not saying all these poetry interactions are necessarily good poetry, but I think it proves the audience is there, even growing into places it wasn't reaching (or didn't exist) 30 years ago, so the analogy to print media doesn't work. Petri continues, proposing that a plethora of bad poetry (or a low percentage of meaningful poetry) might also suggest the death of the form. She says "I think what we mean by poetry is a limp and fangless thing. Poetry has gone from being something that you did in order to Write Your Name Large Across the Sky and sound your barbaric yawp and generally Shake Things Up to a very carefully gated medium that requires years of study and apprenticeship in order to produce meticulous, perfect, golden lines that up to ten people will ever voluntarily read."
Well, yes. I think she has a good point here, one that has been debated for at least as long as I've been writing and collecting my poems. Much of what people pass off as poetry is weakly constructed, confessional fluff, and most credible poets agree on that. And there is a fairly well known divide between those who think an academic credential is necessary to poetry and those who think that same credential is a creativity-killing assimilation process. Both are right. In poetry (or biology, or economics), extra years of study and vetting by those skilled in the art provides peer review, practica, and understanding you could not get on your own. And that is likely to homogenize the field, exposing more poets to more "recognized" poets, creating more poems which call upon similar theory history - in a completely self-aware way, if the process has worked. But the alternative is more poets continuing to explore the same space that other poets have explored before; you risk eliminating the infrequent outlier genius but raise the overall quality of output. My analogy is this: If we didn't teach physics in college, at least one scientist a day would attempt to publish Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation. People would work hard and to great personal satisfaction and the flow of the science would dry up. Teaching the science to all who practice means we're free to explore other spaces within it - if we are creative enough to do so.
One of the arguments made against Petri (and whenever this topic is debated) is that with so many people writing poetry, how can it be dead? During the aftermath of the column, she quite rationally tweeted "Look, I love poetry, I've inhaled, I was an English major, the works. And I know Is It Dead Yet? essays are, er, not un-hack, shall we say./But I do want to hear a better case for poetry than "I do it! And mine's great!"." Again, she's right, and credible poets don't disagree. I think it's wonderful that so many people write poetry and want to share it. But those who write it without reading it are only stoking "poetry is obsolete" fire. Listen: Twitter will begin to die the day people stop retweeting, because it means people have stopped reading other people's tweets. Until then, it may be overused and largely vacuous, but it's still contributing something that cannot be found anywhere else.
Of course, Petri comes to all these conclusions herself, and one realizes she must have started with them in mind. She adds
"And whenever people say this about journalism, they note that people have an insatiable hunger for news. Journalism in its present form may not continue, but journalism will. It will have to. Otherwise where will the news come from?
And this might be the silver lining for poets. The kind of news you get from poems, as William Carlos Williams has it, must come from somewhere. And there is a similar hunger for poetry that persists. We get it in diluted doses in song lyrics. Song lyrics are incomplete poems, as Sondheim notes in the book of his own. If it is complete on the page, it makes a shoddy lyric. But there is still wonderful music to be found in those words. We get it in rap. If we really want to read it, it is everywhere. Poetry, taken back to its roots, is just the process of making — and making you listen."
Which is the rub. The "process of making" requires craft (taken as a knowledge of what works and what doesn't, who you're trying to reach, and knowing what you want to say... which can be acquired through either education or practice as long as either is applied with the diligent and sincere collection of feedback) and content (whether narrative or lyric, topical or ethereal, formal or conversational, personal or persona). If the poem - or the poet - has nothing interesting to say, there is no art. And where there is neither art not interest, no one can be reached... or changed.
Back, then, to the original question: "Can it change anything?" Ask this about the poems you love. Have they affected the way you think in some way? Are you more aware of something now than before you first read them? When you share them, do they raise a response in people who are reading them for the first time? When you discuss them, do they provide something meaningful to talk about, leading you in directions that sometimes surprise you? When you write them, do they end in places that challenge you to find your way back to where you started? Good poems will do these things. And it is these poems that will (continue to) keep poetry alive.
* - Petri herself tweeted: "remind me the next time I criticize a thing that it should be a thing whose practitioners are not noted for their wordcraft." People who pride themselves on their speaking are not wont to shut up.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)