Auntie Dynamite

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September 06, 2003

Volume 33: Just One More Before We Part

I was reading the poems, and getting more and more cross with them, and more and more vocal, when I remembered a recent essay saying writers were the only artists paid to sit around insulting each other. This is misleading and partly irrelevant. Writers get paid to insult each other in print because we get paid for things that're going to be put in print. Some of them involve insulting other people of the profession, because not all writers are good, also horse races, pizza and beer are not always good and often they too need to be insulted. Musicians also occasionally attack each other, but not, yes, so often. An egregious case is John Lennon's "How Do You Sleep?" and Paul McCartney's response with "Let Me Roll It". This shows even more vindictiveness since it takes a bloody lot more effort for music to get published.

Almost no one, percentagewise, reads bad poetry and gets angry about it. Odds are if they do, it's because they're a writer, and they — and by they I mean me — are angry because of the disrespect, shoddiness and wilful obtuseness the poet showed. It's the same anger a chef shows when served lukewarm soup and lukewarm salad. He is not going to look at a dessert and say 'the cinnamon on top is so nice I'm not going to RIP YOUR FUCKING SPLEEN OUT FOR GIVING ME SOMETHING BURNT FROM ASS TO TEAKETTLE — BECAUSE EVEN THE TEA IS BURNT.'

Poetry, like food, has to achieve a certain level of consumability before anybody will consume it. Most people can recognize a bad poem as easily as bad food — occasionally you'll mistake it for something good and get sick but usually you'll instinctively give it a pass. This is why most bad poetry is in tiny, low-circulation journals (though not all of it is bad — and nothing in this polemic should imply that all modern poetry is bad — just the bad stuff). You'll glaze over, because bad poetry is boring, but you'll be polite probably, like you're polite when Aunt Jones brings out the leftover almond cookies from last time you failed to eat them all. You'll eat a cookie, you'll try not to break your teeth, and you'll go home with your side twitching. Not, you think, a big deal. It's fine for you not to be serious about it. There are all kinds of commodities that I am not serious about because I don't have time, inclination or aptitude, and I don't mind poetry being one of those for you.

It stays not a big deal until Aunt Jones insists on promoting her cookies in public — that is, she insists on acting like she is a professional simply because she is interested. Once she does that, it is comprehensible (if not necessarily sensible) for other professionals, who take a very competitive industry very seriously, to try to destroy her as efficiently as possible, just as a professional programmer wants to destroy bugs in software that he has to live near. Poetry is not an area where you can make up with enthusiasm what you lack in talent — but I am getting needlessly mean spirited when what I really am is angry. I think most of these people do have talent and I think what they're doing with it is appalling. They are writing aggressively incoherent tracts and doing themselves a bad turn with it. I am angry because I care about writing as an art, and what these people are doing to themselves. Read your Shakespeare. "One day he gives us diamonds, next day stones." Then read your Orwell: "Vague and muddled language leads to vague and muddled thinking." I cannot be happy about anybody choosing to be vague and muddled about something he is going to do a lot. It all comes back to love, and response to who and what one loves, because I am, as most cynics are, a high-functioning romantic.

The best balanced writing of any kind will last forever, like honey. The rest, while not decomposing as quickly as oranges, will get a little hard, a little cracked, as time dries out on top of it. Of course, one doesn't want to eat honey all the time; not all writing has to be eternal, just functional. I've recently accepted the value of AOL Instant Messenger, after many years of saying "if you want to talk to me, log into my mud". I still vastly prefer my mud because it allows at least crude body language, which I find an invaluable contextualizer, and the mud provides a common reference point for a social group.

I don't use AIM for that many people, and in virtually all cases, I have enough other communications channels open with the person that we can layer probability and history with present content to make the communications obvious. Without that context it's a bit like being in a wind tunnel — everything's fine and then you fall over. Severity — seriousness — is easiest to corrupt, because IM is naturally casual. It can be extremely difficult to gauge how much, if anything, is behind a given comment. Perhaps that videoconferencing stuff is not such a bad idea — the picture and the thousand words, etc.

It depends on what you want to do — but I think most modern poets do not so much want to do as to not do and say they did. If I can generalize something personal enough to write about it, I will, and that, I think, is the essence of poetry — to be ruthless about motivation in the service of long term communication. Whereas if I am saying it just to you, you, you... you need remember it only as long as you like, and then...

Posted by gtaylor at September 6, 2003 12:51 AM

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