A propos of many things, I have been thinking about issues of marginality and acknowledgement. I've realized about myself that even though I'm politically liberal I have a conservative temperment: I am drawn to the mainstream and made nervous by the fringe, drawn to things that are already acknowledged to be "good." For instance, I don't want to send my poems to a journal unless I can come up with some sort of frame of reference in which it is prestegious.
This isn't something I like about myself for a number of reasons, including that for any kind of artist this is a dumb way to be. The whole point of art is to imagine something that's not yet there, to imagine a way to be "good" that no one has ever thought of. Any decent artist is ahead of, or at least radically on the edges of, his or her own time.
That's why all this is such a gamble. You have to find the fringe that has the potential to become a new mainstream, and by definition you won't know if you've succeeded until significantly after the fact. So wanting acknowledgement and recognition from the old, enshrined establishment is an impediment to the whole enterprise. Not to mention wanting acknowledgement from people who don't even value poetry.
I'm trying to feel strength the strength of the effort to live without these things. Even if the product doesn't become meaningful to anyone, it's still a struggle and a sacrifice and there has to be something to that. But I don't like to live on the spinning* edge of things. I never feel I fit in there. Plus it's cold.
*Hence, I skipped spinning ("studio cycling") class this week.
1 comment:
Or you just write what poems you have in you. The whole fringe vs. mainstream debate always seems a bit wrong-headed to me, at least when you come at it from a writer's perspective. Is the feeling that much different for you in reading a good fringe poem than it is when reading a good mainstream poem? For me, not so much--if something in the language moves me in that certain way, if some amount of delight is evoked, I feel it is of poetry. As for being ahead of the times, I think that actually turns out to be usually more right-with-the-times, being able to manipulate the daily language into something that makes more of the day (I apologize for being poetic). Think of ashberry (sic), wcw, Emily, Walt, herbert. These authors seem right smack dab in a certain idiom arisen from whatever cultural currents sit below them. (again Ashbery dipping the bucket--which I find highly suspicious by the way, but I like the convex mirror poem second best to "some trees," so I'm no Ashbery devotee.). Anyway, I guess I'm just saying I have these same worries and then I think they're inhibitive for writing. I don't want to imply that one doesn't make choices (I secretly want to be a formalist but know I also secretly fear most becoming a formalist); one does make choices but I think the language, the diction, is more important than the style, how it sounds as opposed to how it reads. Also much of this is run-on bs, but the mood struck and so it is. Good luck on the GRRRRRRRE tomorrow. --dcb
Post a Comment