Despite and still

I’m writing again, after a year in which the hour a day I had gotten into the habit of devoting to poetry started to seem like the 50 pages I wasn’t reading for prelims. Prelims are over. So is the campaign for research assistants at my university to get the right to form a union, the other reason I had stopped writing. Again, that hour a day I wrote largely unintelligible (and certainly unpublishable) fragments in my notebook started to seem legible only as the hour I wasn’t writing a press release, knocking on an office door to have an organizing conversation, or simply marshaling the immense emotional resources required for an introvert to do such things. Compared to other things I should have been doing, writing started to seem like time I couldn’t afford.

I’m writing again despite the knowledge that my having time to write is underwritten by the middle class-ness that implicates me in the overlapping systems of oppression my writing has not the slightest chance of changing. I’m writing pieces driven largely by my life, despite the fact that my life is noteworthy only for its viritually exact replication in countless other middle class bodies: white, female, 30, grad student three times over, married, able to afford food every day. I’m trying my hardest not to write this poem: “I ate/did/saw something yesterday that was so delicious/meaningful/pretty. It taught me X.” But on many days, every poem seems like that poem.

I’m trying to write despite not having conquered the impasse of my MFA defense: one committee member telling me I had lost my voice, that the writing I did before the MFA was better; one committee member telling me that wasn’t necessarily true but offering little in the way of feedback to help me understand what I might now be trying to do. One reader saying I’d gone too far in trimming out the emotions, one reader saying the emotions weren’t what was missing but something else still was.

I’m going to write even though I’m pretty sure I’m never going to publish. At some point, because I want to be read because I want to keep growing, I’ll probably start trying to get published again, but if readers are what I want, I don’t think publishing in places I currently know how to publish is the answer. I don’t need acceptance slips, I need a community–but all of poetic history tells me you can’t plan those, they just happen in certain cities at certain times, so I have assuredly missed that boat. I’ll write anyway.

I’m going to write even though I also feel fairly certain that I am part of a lost, or at least a gap, generation in many regards: my parents, literal and figurative, have for a long time been unable to prepare me for the meaning of work and achievement in the world ahead of me. I grew up in one world of achievement and am an adult in a very different one. I spent several years trying to become a writer for the future, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to do that in any meaningful way through trying to. As a literary critic in training, the gist I’m getting is that the approach to dealing with the massive poetic output of present moment, the concrete evidence that my feelings of unimportance are not defeatist but just accurate, into a blender and running a nutritional analysis of what comes out rather than reading individual writers. I don’t know how to write around this except to stop writing, and I now think I am not willing to do that  just because it would make sense.

As I’m writing, I’m thinking about just putting my poems on my blog and sending links to friends who might be interested. I’m feeling pretty far outside of any other social network that is likely to lead to formal publication of any kind. Given my frustration with whats getting published via the sampler systems of PD and DV these days, I don’t think I could embarrass myself that much worse than many others appear comfortable with. It’s a thought. What generation am I writing from if I don’t do it? If I do?

 

Lascaux

(I have tried and tried to get the opening image from this Life gallery to show up here. WordPress not being my friend today–but do click!)

Beautiful pictures from original Life photo shoot @ Lascaux caves. That the drawings are all of animals, and so beautiful and motion-filled, seems especially striking to me today. I just feel this immense respect and love for animals coming from these drawings. And the idea that these are probably the oldest art we have access to also seems moving–this is what humans did first. We tried to understand animals. Animals were the mystery and beauty that made us make tools to draw on rock. So when Aristotle writes in the Poetics that human beings are mainly interested in watching other humans, he might actually be revising history rather than stating an obvious starting point for mimetic art. We might not always have been so self-centered. (Interesting that the gallery alternates between pics of the cave and pics of the pic takers–demonstrating that we no longer quite as content as the pic makers were to focus on something other than humans.)

Letter to A re: Sufjan

So, Sufjan last night. He played a couple things from All Delighted
People and most everything from Age of Adz, which came out Tuesday and
if you don’t have it yet, I can drop it for you!

It probably encompassed more mood swings than any other concert I’ve
ever been to, so I just have to share with a fellow Suf lover. Fair
warning: opinions expressed below!

He led off w/ the full version of All Delighted People, which was a
really solid opener I thought. Rocked out a bit more than it sounds on
the EP. During the song he did, indeed, gesture for anyone currently
delighted at the show to raise their hands, but as it was only the
first number and I was a little frightened of what I heard of Age on
the car on the way over, I declined to do so.

Very quickly after that, I began to feel like a long time Bob Dylan
fan who just happened to get her first ticket to see him at the
Newport Folk Festival. I thought all the songs were too long by at
least twice, all the lyrics were flat and depressing, and all the
dissonance added up to nothing. Also, almost every song had
psychadelic animation projected behind the stage, planets flying
around and turning into purple vines and then naked women, etc. I will
just be really closeminded here and say those images annoy me. They
just make me feel like a toddler crawling around on the shag carpet in
the basement, lost among the covers of my mother’s record collection.
And also, if your song needs animation that looks like it was
concocted by someone tripping in 1970, maybe you should have
considered including one of the following things in it: a melody, a
verse, a harmonic progression.

About the middle of the show, Suf confirmed that the analogy I had
formed was correct, by saying “W’ere really happy to be here and
playing all new stuff–bet some of you are really bummed. But I had an
aesthetic crisis, and this is my new way of songwriting, based on
sound and ideas. Coming from the same place, I promise.”

After that, I was just sad. I’m not a hater, I like artists, I like
development. I read Language poetry for fun. But I just really missed
beautiful Suf. I wasn’t ready for noisy Suf. Plus, this stuff is
really heavy–based in part on work by an outsider artist from New
Orleans who was a paranoid schizophrenic and died alone despite having
eleven children. Suf introduced every song as “this is a reflection on
the apocalypse,” or “this is a reflection on standing on the rim of a
volcano and thinking about jumping in.” Good thing he told me not to
do it; I was considering it after that song too. Which isn’t to say
that any of the songs or the performance itself was anything less than
really, really well done. I just didn’t like it, and I didn’t like the
idea that there was no more were Illinoise came from. So sad.

But then.

Something happened right about when D figured out I was miserable
and wanted to leave. Suf announced they were playing the whole 25
minute mess of Impossible Soul (it’s a little like listening to one of
my undergrad’s papers, very draftlike), the last track on Adz. And
then I said, okay, I’ll stay at least until the autotune part. Which
sounds pretty fun in person, I have to say. Then it sounded better.
Then we had someone gone from soulful guitarness to rock to Passion
Pit dance groove and we still had two more lives to go, and everyone
was dancing, and Suf was dancing (like the white boy he so is) and
suddenly it felt a little better. A little.

Then something really amazing happened. They followed up Soul (during
which, I have to say, a few hecklers had made their preference for
“old stuff” known, which made me feel embarrassed for being a similar
kind of dismissive on the inside), with All Things Go from Illinoise,
and I got, I saw it–the new stuff is that road about 1500 miles
further down. I went from being near tears to being kind of amazed.

Just to seal the deal, he came out to play The Revenant on the piano
all by himself, and then that sad pretty one about bone cancer and
ended with what I think might be his greatest piece of pure, lyric
poetry-esque song writing, the song for John Wayne Gacy, which was as
beautiful and creepy as hell.

And then we drove home totally exhausted, and I woke up singing to
myself, “it’s not so impossible.” Hmmm. Maybe.

That is all, if you put up with all that this far!

Happy listening!

voice and Empire

Brian Spears recently tweeted to my attention two pieces debating the ethics of poetic appropriation of experiences you didn’t have and words you didn’t speak. The first is by Abe Louise Young, a poet who helped to curate an online collection archiving the oral histories of people who lived through Hurricane Katrina. The second is by Raymond McDaniel, a poet who used text from those oral histories with acknowledgement but without permission in his book of poetry, Saltwater Empire. (For the record, I have never met McDaniel despite geographical proximity.) There are things I disagree with in both pieces: McDaniel’s disdain for the autobiographical & his apparent belief that he has the right to exist in “the state of being categorically indiscriminate” (good luck with that), and Young’s equation of aesthetic experiment with political indifference for starters, but seeing as I’ve got issues of about something outside one’s direct experience on the brain, I’m going to focus on that.

Imagination. Engagement. Appropriation. Is one of these things not like the others?

Last week, I pulled out the a-word during my discussion of Virginia Woolf, Jack White, and Jack Kerouac. In that post, I made the beginning of a case for the idea that being inspired by or desiring the life of someone you could not possibly be mistaken for is not, inherently, wrong or bad. Of course, Woolf, White, and Kerouac didn’t literally use words that someone else spoke. They, for good or ill, came up with their own words to try to reach social worlds that seemed distant. They also did so within genres that made the creative act clear–Woolf was writing a novel, inventing a character; White  was counting on being judged on his musical chops and whether or not he had earned, musically, his quotations & homage, and Kerouac was explicitly writing in the first person, inviting us to see what he saw and then critique how he saw it.

Here we’ve got a case of someone else’s words and someone else’s experience. I think the problem we perceive here has more to do with the latter than the former. McDaniel cites his source, so it’s not exactly plagiarism. We could count words and quibble about fair use,* but that wouldn’t resolve the bigger question mark, which is how to read what he did: Is he using someone else’s painful experiences to refract off his own, and thereby root it in a context that feels more culturally important, relevant, serious, etc? Or is he using textual material to say something creatively? I’ll admit to being intrigued by his description of the “aesthetic and ethos” of the book. He describes sitting by an apartment swimming pool in August: “All three—water, air, rain—felt like different shapes of the same substance. Different, yet the same. Impossible.”

My critical mind is fairly open on the question of the potential literary value of telling stories that aren’t exactly yours. I’m a fan of the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, I’m sympathetic to arguments that Buffalo Child Long Lance made the best out of a rotten social hand when he passed himself off as a Blood Indian and subsequently wrote an autobiography that should be read as a complex social allegory rather than fact, and I get absolutely furious when people criticize Woman Warrior as a memoir because so much of it is devoted to telling other people’s stories or lack of story. (Probably because I once studied with Bradley, I do hate James Frey, however.)

My less theoretical mind, though, is much more sympathetic to Young than to McDaniel.  McDaniel points out that he acknowledges the Truth Alive site, its creators, and its narrators in his book and includes a section discussing his method. I understand, to some extent, why this had to be enough for him: he didn’t want collaborators, he wanted material. Asking for permission would have meant giving other people a say in how his book turned out. In his mind, getting that material rather than making up his own was a way of getting outside of himself and acknowledging others’ voices. There is an argument to be made for using quotations rather than coming up with some fictionalized, truthy version, and there’s also, as Young points out, a tradition of poetry of witness. There are ways, Young suggests, that you can ethically engage.

McDaniel has tradition on his side too, although it’s a tradition that’s getting fairly picked apart in the critical world–the tradition of Pound and every other modernist that’s used source texts at will and with an insistence on the mystery & insularity of the creative process. Collaboration is not an aesthetic that gets much traction in this tradition.

If the issue, then, isn’t that it’s impossible to use others’ lives and texts to drive your own work but that McDaniel “did it wrong,” what beyond his biography tells us so? I am perhaps swayed by the way Young narrates her own decision as a poet to devote her time and energy in New Orleans post-Katrina not to writing poetry about it but to giving people who were potentially being reduced to media images a chance to speak publicly about it in a well-supported way. Yes, she could have gone the McDaniel route and used all the text around her as a prop for her own work, but she didn’t. I’m sympathetic to that choice, and perhaps my sympathy has something to do with growing up female and absorbing the idea that someone has to do what should get done before she does what she might want. Is that the only ethical choice one can make as a poet, or as a poet who has at least as much privilege as to have gotten an MFA? I don’t know if I’d go that far, either.

I think my hang up is with the imbalance of power that the existence of the book embodies. One person speaks and it’s “just” oral history. Another uses that speech to create, and it’s art. In an ideal world, there’d be no way anyone could appropriate these narrators’ words because they would already be well-known in their own right. They’d be getting recognition not just as victims but as people who have done work to tell a story important for our culture to hear. Using an oral history today, right now from post-Katrina New Orleans is qualitatively different than using a long-dead Chinese poet because it perpetuates a systematic problem that is ongoing–meaning, it’s happening in the present so it can be changed, in some small way, by acting in the present. I can do that by reading some of the original texts and thinking about the way I approach writing.

There’s only one thing I wrote last week that these two pieces have really caused me to question, which is my assessment that the writers I talked about got away with their brand of ventriloquism because they did it well. By that standard, I should say I can’t possibly answer the question of whether or not McDaniel did something ethically wrong until I’ve read his poetry–when of course the two questions are unrelated. I have his book on request at the library now.* But I’d have to acknowledge to leave this question to be answered by “time,” by waiting to see if there is uptake of McDaniel’s work on the level of aesthetics and poetic tradition (whatever that may be), is another way of leaving this imbalance of power intact in the present. I think the most I can do right now is be aware of that, and think about how that will influence my own writing and teaching while accepting, and maybe even embracing, that others will not reach the same conclusions I do for their own work.

* I’m assuming that McDaniel is making next to no money from his book, the same amount that most poets make for their books. He was, however, in the process of gaining a fair amount of recognition, which in the world of academy-based work can eventually translate into financial gain. If, for some reason, he was making a ton of money from this book, the copyright or wrongness of this would be much more clear. He’d owe royalties.

*Not promising I’ll read the whole thing. The title of the long poem he built around text from the oral histories is entitled “Convention Centers of the World.” That title to me, as a writer, smacks of Big Idea and Intellectual Construct without Jagged, Unexpected Language to go with, and I’m not interested in that.