sprung off exactly what?
for years i have critiqued my own work - or noted a limit of it - as being "sprung off nothing". i am not sure why that sense of a tabula rasa in the genesis of my work persisted so long, but the critque went as follows:
-that work comes out of the blue. you just "made it up".
-made up work lacks the meatiness and accessibility of an intersubjective work
-an intersubjective work takes/draws from/manipulates/subverts some pre-existing independant entity ( a book, person, film, place etc.) and locates it as a subject or concern of the work
-works with subjects or concerns with recognizable third-party noun states are "real" works of art. they participae in an on-going discourse.
-works made up out of the blue are not participatory in age-old discourses. they are empty narcissiticistic mirrors.
if i come clean, it would be that this line of thinking (and the emotional responses to situations buried in those thoughts) has been a massive harm to me as a writer. not to mention that it doesn't make much sense. the "out of the blue" or spontaneous work has a momentary, investigative subject which immediately arises - multiple subjects arising - with the first letter, word, phrase, line. that subject too has the same ability and flexibility open to it that a...
well, how much can you write about how fucked up you are? at some point THAT becomes narcissism too. but, alongside making peace with (and perhaps airing out) my own methods and critiques thereof, i have a question too:
to what extent does poetry participate in repression? what are its traces? what stance as readers do we take towards poems which engage in this form of violence, and what responsibility, what awareness, as writers can we bring to the continual in-built repressions of our own work? who out there feels these questions resonante, and who feels they're irrelevent?
in terms of defining represion, i don't have a lot of ammo here, but i am attracted to the creative perversity in Foucault's use of the term - so repression is a productive relationship, but one where the productive relationship is alienated to such an extent as to be bastardized, and furthermore, disowned/unrecognized. the classic example is how the focus on policing adolescent sexuality in the 19th century resulted in an explosion of interest ina nd attention to adolescent sexuality, to the point that the repressive microscope of the Victorians (no touching yerself downthere, no touching anyone else down there too) ended up becoming an inculative manure for perversion, creating a whole cultural legion of artifacts with a prurient interest. in short, the repression of adolescent sexuality fostered a myth of adolescent sexuality, which was then disseminated in ever-wider circles, ending up in such far-off palces as 20th century post-war teen flicks and the legions of underground kiddie-porn websites, magazines etc.
fellow bloggers, i am benighted w/ a sense of exhaustion here. what else can i do? i must be missing something, on second thought, the real answer to the above questions is in the next poem we write. let me rephrase - please no more kiddie porn, okay? take a good look in the closets, kids.
-that work comes out of the blue. you just "made it up".
-made up work lacks the meatiness and accessibility of an intersubjective work
-an intersubjective work takes/draws from/manipulates/subverts some pre-existing independant entity ( a book, person, film, place etc.) and locates it as a subject or concern of the work
-works with subjects or concerns with recognizable third-party noun states are "real" works of art. they participae in an on-going discourse.
-works made up out of the blue are not participatory in age-old discourses. they are empty narcissiticistic mirrors.
if i come clean, it would be that this line of thinking (and the emotional responses to situations buried in those thoughts) has been a massive harm to me as a writer. not to mention that it doesn't make much sense. the "out of the blue" or spontaneous work has a momentary, investigative subject which immediately arises - multiple subjects arising - with the first letter, word, phrase, line. that subject too has the same ability and flexibility open to it that a...
well, how much can you write about how fucked up you are? at some point THAT becomes narcissism too. but, alongside making peace with (and perhaps airing out) my own methods and critiques thereof, i have a question too:
to what extent does poetry participate in repression? what are its traces? what stance as readers do we take towards poems which engage in this form of violence, and what responsibility, what awareness, as writers can we bring to the continual in-built repressions of our own work? who out there feels these questions resonante, and who feels they're irrelevent?
in terms of defining represion, i don't have a lot of ammo here, but i am attracted to the creative perversity in Foucault's use of the term - so repression is a productive relationship, but one where the productive relationship is alienated to such an extent as to be bastardized, and furthermore, disowned/unrecognized. the classic example is how the focus on policing adolescent sexuality in the 19th century resulted in an explosion of interest ina nd attention to adolescent sexuality, to the point that the repressive microscope of the Victorians (no touching yerself downthere, no touching anyone else down there too) ended up becoming an inculative manure for perversion, creating a whole cultural legion of artifacts with a prurient interest. in short, the repression of adolescent sexuality fostered a myth of adolescent sexuality, which was then disseminated in ever-wider circles, ending up in such far-off palces as 20th century post-war teen flicks and the legions of underground kiddie-porn websites, magazines etc.
fellow bloggers, i am benighted w/ a sense of exhaustion here. what else can i do? i must be missing something, on second thought, the real answer to the above questions is in the next poem we write. let me rephrase - please no more kiddie porn, okay? take a good look in the closets, kids.
posted by Kyle at 1:29 PM
1 Comments:
Hey Kyle,
as with a lot of your blogs, I'm slightly puzzled, but intrigued. Are you asking to let it all hang out? Myles' shipwreck? I'm for that. What else can you do? Am I off track? I see a responsibility there; a responsibility if you choose to acknowledge that repsonsibility--some do/and the flipside. I try to, but I also try to keep it from getting in the way. Should I stop here, if completely on another subject?
I do think the answer is in the next text, that is the sole way most (hopefully) will get to know us (via the text.) As the texts progress, so do the readers' umbrellaed notions of our persons through our texts. No more kiddie porn? Maybe I missed it.
I'm aware when I read an unsocially conscious writer. And yes, it gives me pause. But the surface is hardly ever the meat of it, so you have to watch out for being an alarmist too.
Does poetry participate in repression? Sure. Poetry is steeped in the upper crusts of the past, and present, but it also flourishes in the rest (old drinking songs/troubadours/ and up to today's hip hop artists/poetry slams.) But that's all base, you know all that..., so I'm curious what you're driving at? It must be a more specific angle...
I try to be as socially aware in my writing as possible--if anything, I tend to go too far the other directions, making my writing more "other" as they say, in perspective than I can personally experience in my own life. That gives me pause also. I overcompensate, so it can be damaging. Sometimes I wish to be free of the whole damn question and just see where my mind leads, but do I really want to open Crumb's door? Into the pit of who the hell knows? I hate the thought that my writing can be repressive, but it may be an inevitable circumstance as I continue my attempts at breaking down as many manufactured filters to my personal(public) perspective of the world. Does that make sense?
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