Supporting the Artist

Hello,

This is a rare direst communication and ask to my followers on this blog, rather than the usual essays or poems or photos. I rarely speak to you directly, except in comments, so this is a bit new to me, too.

I have started a Patreon site, which is intended to help me make a living as a creative artist.

Below, I will post the text of a long email, with updates, that I have sent out to family and friends. I have a favor to ask, which is detailed in the email, but which I will summarize briefly, first.

Basically, going forward it looks as if my best recourse in life is to pursue my arts career full-time, in which case I need patronage and support. Now that I am disabled, it's hard for me to do anything else, like hold down a regular job, but I do need to earn some level of income, and the best way to do that is to ask for help, and in return make everything I do creatively available to my patrons. They see what I am doing first, and they get first crack at what I have created, be in photographs, music, a new typeface (I have made three in the past year!), and so on.

The favor I want to ask is in two parts:

1. Please visit my Patreon site, read the introductory text I wrote about all this, or watch the video I made to introduce myself. If you would like to support me as an artist, in whatever small capacity, please do. No amount is too small, and every bit helps enormously.

Link to my Patreon site:
https://www.patreon.com/ArthurDurkee

2. Please pass on the news to your own friends and email contacts, especially those you think might be interested. To do that, you can cut and paste the email text below into your own email, and send it off. Or if you just wish to pass along the Patreon site and other links, please do that.

Thank you!

I am in the process of moving my creative activities, including the kinds of posts I have done on this blog for the past several years, onto my Patreon site, and making it into my new blog. I post a Public post at least once a week, which the whole world can see. The rest of my posts are for patrons only. But my lowest threshold of support is only US $2, so if you really want to keep following me, there's a very inexpensive way to do it.

Thank you again. Sincerely Yours,

Arthur

Email text is below.

Here are the links, also in the email below, relevant to this occasion. More will be added later.

Link to my Patreon site:
https://www.patreon.com/ArthurDurkee

Link to my Redbubble online store:
https://www.redbubble.com/people/arthurdurkeeart?asc=u

Link to the GoFundMe set up to help me replace the gear stolen from my van in Palm Springs, last March:
https://www.gofundme.com/replacingstolenmusicgear

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Dear Family, Friends, and Supporters—

I am contacting many of you on my email list with an update and some important arts-career-related news. Later on, I am going to ask a favor.

First, an update:

I am for this summer living in the Ann Arbor, MI, area, for now, where I will have a roof over my head, and thus can get a lot of work done in a settled place—I can set up my recording studio and work on the two albums of music I have been thinking about for awhile; I can paint; I can write; I have a base from which to roam, go camping, do road trips, and bring back more new photos and ideas to work on.

Ann Arbor, MI, many of you know, is the closest thing to a home town that this nomad has. It's a little strange being back in Michigan, this summer—much remains the same, much has changed. I will be based here in Michigan for the summer, during which time I will be doing some camping excursions, a music seminar in July at Interlochen Arts Academy in northern Michigan, and more. I will also be driving to Wisconsin periodically, to continue to sort through what I have left in my storage lockers there. As for where I will be past this summer, I haven't planned that far ahead. I have options, including heading back to the Southwest and California for the winter. All that will depend on where I find a place to stay.

This past winter I spent mostly in New Mexico and California. I was very happy to stay with my bestie Becca and her Mr. Man in Paso Robles, CA. Because, you know, wine country! After that, I was in Palm Springs for several months; or rather, in and around PS, as I never found an actual place to live. Some things happened that were wonderful, like having an opportunity to sing with Modern Men, the Coachella Valley Men's Chorus, which led to a very fun concert experience singing choral jazz arrangements from the American Songbook. I made many new friends, and renewed some existing friendships in the LGBT chorus movement. I knew that the Palm Springs area was a retirement community; I did not know that it was such a huge gay chorus retirement community!

Some less-than-great things happened during my stay in Palm Springs, too, all of which I survived, learned from, and which I have now moved past. My van was broken into, and music gear and my cameras were stolen. I am currently raising funds to replace my stolen microphones, while some friends and donors have already helped me replace the cameras and other gear. (I include links to my GoFundMe campaign and my other online arts activities below.)

I learned how to live fairly comfortably in a tent and a van. My friend Al helped build me a solar power rig, which is portable and which I can use to power my laptops and mobile devices wherever I am camped; it works very well, and allows me to do my creative work well into the evening, even while living far off the grid. I now have a Disabled Access pass for the National Parks, which means I get into the National Parks free for the rest of my life, and also gives me a 50 percent discount for camping. I also now have the same sort of access card for the California State Parks, which discounts 50 percent off all fees.

All of that is going to be VERY useful. Traveling and camping out West becomes a LOT cheaper. I feel at home in the National Parks; they are a huge source of inspiration to me, and also a place where I feel at home, and alive, and safe. I am probably meant to remain semi-nomadic, at this time of my life, so I hope to travel safely for as long as health permits. The "snowbird" pattern of spending winters in warmer climes appeals to me.

During my time in the Palm Springs area, I learned that asking for help leads to help being given, in large ways and in small. People stepped forward to help me after the van was broken into; others in Modern Men helped me enormously with attire for the concerts; still others found music-recording gigs for which I earned a little money. Being my Mother's son, asking for help, when you need it, is kind of a new concept for me; but I am getting a lot of practice. I am no longer ashamed to ask for what I need, and no longer afraid of getting a "No" in response. All you an do is ask; people help you if they can; even if they can't help you in tangible ways, the moral support is also wonderful.

To that end, I have created a Patreon artistic patronage website.

Patreon is a patronage paradigm: people support creative artists whose work they like directly, via donation, rather than going through a record company or a publisher as distributors. All kinds of creative work appears on Patreon, from music to comic books to the genuinely unclassifiable. I support a few artists myself, in my own small way, including Amanda Palmer, whose TED talk and book "The Art of Asking" inspired me to do this, along with some friends who recommended Patreon to me directly.

Patreon.com makes it easier for artists to connect with their audience, no matter how specific or tiny their niche is. I currently have a dozen patrons who directly support my art-making. Part of the agreement between artists and patrons is that patrons get first access to the work I am doing, and special treats that no one else gets. That is described in more detail on my Patreon page.

So here is the favor I want to ask, in two parts:

1. Please visit my Patreon site, and look it over. There is an introductory video I made that introduces the concept, and gives some of the background; there is also a text description. (I filmed the video at one of my favorite locations for photography in Joshua Tree National Park.) Please consider becoming a patron of mine, for as little as $2 per month, or for whatever higher value you think the work is worth. I assure you, every bit goes a very long way.

You can look my Patreon site over at this URL address:

https://www.patreon.com/ArthurDurkee

2. Please pass this email along to your own email circle of friends, especially those you believe might be interested in supporting the arts, so that they too can look it over. Please help me spread the word! I would be very grateful.

The good people at Patreon say again and again that the way this works is to spread the news far and wide, and see what happens. I just need a few more people to be fans—fans of the art I make, and the music, and video work, and type design, and all the various art forms I practice, many of which have already started to earn me some income. I have several friends around the world, who are musicians and artists, who are somehow making it work, via means similar to Patreon, and via their constant presence online. You have to let people know what you are doing—so I am! Even if you can't support me as an artist, please do support me in passing the word along about what I am doing.

That's it. That's all I am asking for.

This is my best shot at rebuilding my life, after long illness and recovery, and several years that were hard to get through. And here I am, still going. I am doing better, I am feeling better, I have restarted my life after that long illness, and I feel positive about it. My mind can still get fogged over by lingering after-effects of the chronic illness I survived; yet even on my worst days, I make art. It's what I do.

I anticipate that, going forward, making art will be more and more what I do. It's what I am best at doing. Perhaps it was what I was meant to do all along, and in some ways it's the only thing I am very good at doing. It is as fundamental to my being as breathing.

So, if you are able to help me, in any way, to continue to do my creative work, and to grow and evolve as an artist and human being, please do.

Thank you reading this very long email.

Thank you for being my friends, and fans, and supporters. (I know that for some of you this update is not fresh news, as you are already my Patreon supporters. Thank you for your additional patience.)

Thank you for being my family, both family of origin and family of choice, in every way that matters.

Thank you to each and every one of you who has helped me get through the past few years, to finally emerge on the other side, and start over, and build a new life as a professional creative artist. Thank you!

Please look over my Patreon site, and let me know what you think. And please pass it on. I am also researching means to sell my original photography and visual art online, and also my original typeface designs. I hope to have more news about that soon.

Thank you very sincerely, and with much love and gratitude—

Arthur Durkee
www.arthurdurkeemusic.com
www.arthurdurkeephoto.com
www.arthurdurkee.net
artdurkee.blogspot.com

Link to the GoFundMe set up to help me replace the gear stolen from my van in Palm Springs:
https://www.gofundme.com/replacingstolenmusicgear

Link to my Patreon site:
https://www.patreon.com/ArthurDurkee

Link to my Redbubble online store:
https://www.redbubble.com/people/arthurdurkeeart?asc=u<>BR>

Playing and Making

Music performance and composition:

Lots of us play musical instruments, or sing. I play adequately, and I sing well (albeit not this week, thanks to pneumonia). But I was not a performance major, practicing several hours per day. I was a composition major. My urge has always been to Make, rather than recreate.

I do believe you have to be able to do both. I can read music like a sonofabitch, and I could do so even before I went to music school. I've been musical since I was 4 or 5 years old. I started piano at age 6 or 7, and I started singing in choir and chorus at that age, as well. The Lutheran church in Ann Arbor that my family went to had a music staff who were at the University of Michigan, and we did a lot of ambitious music in church choir: before age 24 I had sung probably a third of all the Bach Cantatas, some more than once. So I have some pretty good performance chops.

But I'll never be as good a Chapman Stick player, or bassist, as several of my friends are. I don't put in the practice time. (I'm not a slacker. In fact, for most of my adult life, I had an undiagnosed chronic illness that sapped my strength and willpower, and which I will spend the rest of my life recovering from.) There was a period in my 30s when I was in several bands that focused on improvised music; so you could say I was composing on a weekly basis, and playing spontaneous music. But most of that went direct to recording, and was never notated. It's only in the past five or six years that I've begun seriously notating written music scores again, and I've been prolific throughout this period. (Within the limitations of chronic illness and post-illness, always.) When I was in my 30s I did not suck as a player, but in fact I'm a better player now, even though I play gigs less often: time and experience do that, no matter what age you begin. I don't have as many opportunities to play, which sucks, but on balance I'm musically satisfied because I'm writing more.

My focus was always on Making. On writing music. On composing. I have been reading a biography of Wayne Shorter, which made a comparison between Shorter's meticulous writing of music and Joe Zawinul's habit of improvising a piece, then transcribing it, and declaring it done. Actually, I do both. Both of those methods work for me. Most of the music I recorded in my 30s and 40s was never notated, but it WAS recorded, and stands as pieces. I did on occasion transcribe music I had recorded and made it into a score others could play. ("Night/Fire" on my album The Western Lands was done this way.) If I had enough energy, or an assistant, I could transcribe most of what I recorded in those years, and give you a score you could play from. (But I don't. If I have any regrets about surviving chronic illness, it's that I never had the energy to do what I wanted to do, and so much never got finished.)

You see, that's been the trade-off: I will never learn to play as many songs as many of my friends do, and I'll never play them as well as they do. (Mostly. I do have my moments.) But most of them don't compose as much I do, either. That's the trade-off I observed way back in music school, where I was majoring as a composer: what your emphasis is, is probably what it will in future. Bruce Cockburn, the great songwriter, once said something that really stuck with me: "I don't know many songs that I didn't write." (He then said, "But this is one of them," and launched into Monty Python's "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life." A song, I might add, that I also know, that I didn't write.)

In music school I focused on making new music; all of us music school students who were not performance-track were required to play or sing, and have declared instruments, but even then in my piano and percussion minors I preferred to focus on new music. (Or music so old it was new all over again: hence my minors in Medieval and Renaissance music.) In music school, and after, I was involved with a group of composers and performers who presented concerts of new music several times a year; some of us were both performers and composers, and traded hats as needed. It was a very fertile ground upon which to write and have performed new music scores. It was also the time in which I began to learn to play jazz, and improvise.

Im not sure why I wanted to write about this, today. Maybe it's because I never stop thinking about music, no matter what else is going on. Maybe it's because I see some of my Stick playing pals and other musician pals having all these minor and major successes in their musical lives that make me want to stand up and cheer. And I do cheer! And then, sometimes, I think about how the touring musician life was never one I could take on (undiagnosed chronic illness, for one; opportunities, for another). It makes me very happy to see some of my friends out there on the road, and to get to their concerts as often as I am able (energy permitting: I'd go to a hell of a lot more concerts if I had the strength).

I genuinely enjoy hearing my friends make their music. I love hearing what they do. I'll never play as well as they do, and I'm okay with that.

And then I go home and go back to writing. It's just what I do.

Creativity: Observing Improvisation

Observations on making art in the moment of making it:

When I'm improvising music, or playing music in general, I'm often making lots of decisions about what to do in the moment. The fallacy that many intellectuals have about the improvisation process, though, is that this requires verbal cognition. It doesn't. It's a profoundly non-verbal sort of process. Making art for me is not an intellectual puzzle-solving game-theory process; you can only analyze it that way afterwards, not during. Words are the very last tool in use to guide or distribute the process of improvising in the moment. Even when I improvise a poem in the moment, the words are the product, not the tool; which perhaps accounts for why so many of my poems are sequences-of-images.

Many writers I know cripple themselves by revising as they write, rather than dumping it all onto the page and editing it later. If you bring in the inner critic or the inner editor too soon, all too often the creative spark is what gets lost, and the result is often very dry, very cerebral. It may be very interesting to the intellect alone, but it won't endure in the somatic or sensual memory.

That's the problem with almost all verbally-directed cerebrally-dominated art-making: its products don't endure in the emotional, somatic, or psychological memories, just in the intellectual. (Not neglecting that many intellectuals conflate the intellect as being all of psychology, when it is in fact only a small element.) Writing a poem in a fixed form is a fascinating intellectual game, but I can only think of two or three sestinas or villanelles I've ever read that stayed with me; the rest are all forgotten, more form than substance. Machaut wrote memorable villanelles a few hundred years ago; Neil Gaiman write the most memorable sestina I can recall about ten years ago. And that's about it.

The only poetic form I regularly write in is haiku, which is a hugely open-ended form emphasizing how images lead to emotional responses; it's actually a very emotive form. When you see an ironic or humorous poem in the 5-7-5 syllable form, that's actually NOT a haiku (unless it's in the mode of Issa); it's a senryu, or something else, not actually a haiku. Again, the prevalence of the haijin (haiku writer) state of mind in my poetry might account for why so many of my poems are sequences-of-images. It's a natural form and style to me, made even more so by time and experience.

When I was improvising music yesterday to play along with a silent film I wasn't stopping and thinking about what I was going to do. There was no outline. There was response in-the-moment. The big thing that many people forget, who are not experienced improvisors, is that every decision that happens is not thought out beforehand. There's no time for verbal analysis. You just go. Improvising music is in fact a very non-verbal process. Analysis, by critics and music theorists, of what happens later, is by contrast a very verbal process. But it's not that way in the moment of making. Critics and theorists (and artists who are cerebrally dominant) would do well to remember that distinction. It's a very important one.

Random Notes on a Writer's Life

Productivity: as usual, I am sporadic. As always those critics who think all composers, writers, and songwriters are (or should be!) daily-disciplined craftsmen who write every day, and who dismiss inspiration and the Muses as beyond the pale, are wrong. I've had that argument too many times for it to be interesting anymore: the "you're not a disciplined writer!" accusation against me, because I'm not a daily-disciplined writer, but one who waits and listens for those inner voices to bring something forward—and yet the critics and writers who would chastise me for being "undisciplined" by their standards still can find nothing wrong with what I write, it's not inferior to their own work, I produce enough work to satisfy demand, and despite grumbling they often accept it for publication. My discipline is to always be ready to write it down, whenever it comes forward to be written down. I find nothing kills freshness like stale rote "discipline." It's true that daily writing practice can help you polish your art, and improve your craft—but if you have nothing to say, so what? It's just hollow words.

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So, as usual, I'm sporadic. Yet, in the past week or so, I've gotten down three poems, two of which are probably more in the song lyric column, all of which will be worked on more, later. I've also had some musical ideas floating around. In the next few months, I need to write another larger choral commissioned work, and I'm putting out tendrils to gather in ideas, inspirations, and texts.

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Last night I rolled into the computer a cassette of a Barbaric Yawps live show, recorded in July 1996 at the Madison Art Fair on the Square. I was listening in particular to my own solos on Chapman Stick for those world-music-inspired progressive/free jazz band pieces that we worlked hard to perfect; the Yawps always played on the fractal edge where form and chaos touch, always intentional but near the edge of flying off in any direction. There was a power and life-force aspect to playing with the Yawps that was one of my favorite things about the band. We opened this Art Fair set with one of my own pieces written for the Yawps, "Nomads," which is written in a post-Ellington complex (world music inspired) scale, with polychords; I can readily admit that "Nomads" was my response to "Caravan," just pushed further and a bit more off-kilter and polytonal. (I wrote a few tunes for the Yawps, but most of the music was created by reeds player Tom Lachmund.)

Last weekend I was at Interlochen, in Michigan, for the biannual Interlochen Stick Workshop, my second time attending. I want to do more Stick workshops. I need to reconnect with the music and musicians, and begin doing regular gigs again. This is way of both improving my own playing skills, and networking; both are beneficial. The social aspect of the Stick seminar was actually as powerful for me as the actual classroom work.

Hearing the Yawps recording from 1996, I hear myself playing chordally-complex jazz solos that I can still hear in my head, but haven't played lately. I can hear my conceptual zone in play there, and I had finger dexterity I lack, now. I know I lost ground when I was really sick, a few years ago, and didn't have the strength to do much playing. Now, I want to turn that around. I'm getting my strength back, slowly, and want to get my playing skills back. I like what I heard during this 19 year old performance: recorded before I was really sick, and before I moved out West, and things got chaotic and my (as yet undiagnosed) illness worsened, and robbed me of life-force. I no longer had the strength to practice regularly, and even though I was gigging when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, it wasn't regular, and it was more on the avant-garde and free-jazz range of music-making, which doesn't require me to deepen my performance technique, in some ways. Being at a seminar that forced me at times to back up and re-learn some basic techniques and ideas was refreshing, stimulating, inspiring, and enlivening. Give me more!

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Downside of being a lifelong science fiction, mystery, and fiction reader: I often spot the plot twists well in advance. It's partly because linear narrative has s logic to it, and it's partly because, as a storyteller oneself you know how stories are constructed. Even more than that, as a student of myth and folklore, and of the archetypes, you look for and find patterns in how stories are constructed. It's no secret that Joseph Campbell, the mythologist and anthropologist, was a student of Carl Jung, the depth psychologist who proposed the idea of archetypes of the collective unconscious; and it's no secret that I am a student of both these teachers.

Still, when I encounter a storyteller who can really surprise me, or whose work is a fresh take on the oldest myths, I treasure being surprised. That itself is one big reason I still read SF.

(And for the record, nobody uses "sci fi" to describe the genre except outsiders and popular media junkies.)

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Meanwhile, I had a real, genuine, short story published this year, in JONATHAN magazine. An actual short story! An actual, for that matter, science fiction short story! It was titled "Shimmer," and is in the May 2015 issue. So I guess I can legitimately call myself a fiction writer now, a storyteller.

And I have had a scattering of short-short stories accepted for next year, as well.

I have also had a number of poems accepted for publication later this year.

I don't submit a lot, and I admit I'm sporadic about writing. Sometimes I do my best work under deadline pressure, and when I am asked to write something. It gives me a kick in the pants to get it done.

And my art installation at Silverwood County Park, The Temple of Deep Time, has been extended for a year. And I am being asked to submit proposals for new installations, for other settings and occasions. So I am being asked, and I am working to meet those deadlines.

This also reflects my increasing ability to actually Do The Work. The return of life-force and strength makes me able to meet these requests and goals. For now, it's very helpful for me to have an external push; at some point, the external push will be less necessary, but always welcome. I am still getting used to the idea that, for most of my adult life, I was not actually lazy and unmotivated, I was sick. I was sick! Sick with an illness that robbed me of strength, of life-force, of motivation, of mental health, and much more. I am too old now to probably ever fully recover; and yet here I am, able to do more now than I could imagine a few short years ago, and with the desire to do it all. I will never have "normal health" for someone my age—but I can do more than I have been able to in a decade. I am aware, today, that when I am not feeling PTSD or crushed down by life, I feel so energized I can barely keep myself in my body. And I am aware of how much I want to get done in whatever remaining years I have left.

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It needs to be said, again, though: I don't make art for purposes of "self-expression," that hoary Romantic myth. Sometimes I do, but mostly when I make art I feel egoless rather than ego-empowered. There are things I have to say, and want to say, but a significant percentage of what I Make just has to be made, and I don't feel like I'm in charge, or "controlling" that, or the master of it. It just happens. Often I don't know what's going on anymore than you do—until afterwards. Craft is great for analysis, and theory is great for figuring out what you just did. It's not a very good prescriptive master, though, but more of a tyrant when applied beforehand rather than afterwards.

Why I'm Not Writing Poems At the Moment

Well, it's complicated.

Of course, that's what one always says. But there is truth to it. I am at the moment going through an exhausting process of getting rid of most of my belongings, preparing to sell my house and move, probably even be homeless for a month or two, and going on from there. It's a big change, and often quite overwhelming. It is so enveloping a situation that I find myself not making much art right now—which is an aberration in itself—and in particular not doing much writing.

This is one of those things that I will write about when it's all over. When, during the course of the summer, I will probably be living in a tent, traveling for a bit, spending some time absorbing and processing what has been happening, and what has happened, and thinking about What Next. I often do much of my my best thinking and writing while traveling. I often write longhand when on the road, poems, essays, journal rants, even the occasional short story. I expect that to happen, this summer, once the dust settles. I really miss not having been able to travel much in the past year or so. Cabin fever has been a constant problem. I didn't get to do a road trip out West in the past 20 months, and I can feel both the spiritual and psychological pressure, and the physical restlessness, that are a result.

Not making art is not good for me. I've been under too much stress and anxiety. So, sometimes I just have to shout. Sometimes you just have to. I have been making some art, in between, but the stress and physical exhaustion of all that must get done has often left me with no energy after a long day or night, and I just collapse. It's not good for me to not make art. It can be worrisome if I'm not getting that done.

And the truth is, I have been in a music-making and visual art mode for several months, writing only scraps of poetry, and shorter personal essays, rather than longer poems and so on. I have been composing a lot of music in the past few years, and that is so very satisfying that it sometimes makes the rest of the art-making go away. Music is still my centre, my core, my deepest source and root. Poetry has never been the primary art form for me—which has been known to piss off other poets, who think it ought to be, or like my poems well enough that they want more. Well, most of them have other jobs, too: so they have no pressure on their writing beyond what they put into it. I am required to use my creativity for whatever trickle of income it generates. So I wrote a short poem when I am moved to: not when folks want me to. It's a matter of focus.

But also of crop rotation. Right now, I'm just not in poetry mode. I expect that will come around again. Honestly, I write a lot of poems, and good or better poems, when I'm not feeling so musically satisfied. The visual art is on its own parallel track, because these days it just goes on no matter what, since even my cellphone has an excellent camera on it. I can always make photos.

Recently I spent some time in the Art Institute of Chicago, looking at artwork. It's always inspiring to visit a museum full of paintings and other art. You get ideas. You absorb the vibe. You think about how other artists lived and worked. You feel validated in even some of your craziest. It's always a good day when it's spent in an art museum.

And so, why I'm not writing poems at the moment doesn't really matter. It will shift back in that direction when I'm on the road again, I have no doubt of it. I hope to write a few more songs soon, as I am finally ready to gather enough songs to record a solo album of songwriting. There will be other singers than myself, I hope; singers with better voices, albeit under my producer's direction. I hope to get to that once I'm past this big change in life. Stay tuned.

For the moment, this is just a ramble out loud down the thinking lane towards the garden of forking paths. Who knows what's around the nest turn? I never have known what art I'm going to make next. I just do it, and see what happens. And we go on.

Are you an Artist or a Maker?

I tend to think of myself as a "maker," because "artist" carries a lot of baggage around what people assume an "artist" to be. This is as true for artists as for non-artists.

(Point of order: Not everyone makes "art" or "fine art," or even "arts and crafts," but everyone has creativity as their human birthright. We are all creative in little ways, and in other ways, even if we do not "make art.")

Although I can call myself an Artist, because I have made "fine art" that has hung in galleries and walls in homes, and I do practice several artforms and art skillsets that are recognized as being "fine art," including music composition, poetry, painting, photography, multimedia, and so on, I tend to prefer to use "Maker" because it's a more neutral term. I make stuff. Some of it is art, some of it is just stuff that a creator makes, or a gadget engineer, or an artist making a sketch.

A lot of the baggage that "Artist" carries is cultural stereotypes and hoary romanticized clichés: you have to suffer for your art; artists are lonely, tortured souls who alone in starving squalor; artists are inherently disorganized and incapable of managing their lives; artists are depressed or suicidal drunks; and so on. Note how many clichés about artists are negative rather than positive: that's the cultural narrative since the early Romantic poets, and it's a narrative that's never been more than 25 percent true. For one thing, if artists really were that tortured and depressed all the time, they'd never actually have the energy to make their art.

Even the associated cultural narrative of "the artist's heroic struggle against the world dragging you down, to produce your masterpiece" is more myth than fact; because even artists like myself, who work more from intuition rather than intellect, still make art as a daily prctice, as a mode or way of being. Part of making things is just to make them, every day, as an ordinary activity. Like going to do your job.

For me, making art is a very positive thing, not a negative thing. It's not work I have to force myself to do, or fight to achieve. Making art is as necessary, and as easy, as breathing. It's not a heroic struggle, not even when I'm struggling against physical ailment or depression. You can view making art as therapeutically balancing or expressing life's many problems (glass half empty), or you can view it as transcending and overcoming life's many problems (glass half full). The truth is, making art is what you do, whether you're having a bad month or a good one; you just keep making art, no matter what. It can be your everyday salvation, it can give you reason to go on living, it can be the routine, the one constant in your life while everything else is falling apart.

Ironically, even though there are many "positive thinkers" out there who probably think I'm negativity personified (probably because I reject their simplistic aphorisms in favor of more nuanced and realistic overviews), in truth I'm very optimistic and positive about the benefits of expanding creativity in one's life to the utmost. I do think it's good that we all make art of some kind, even if no one but you ever sees it or knows you do it. The purpose of making a painting isn't to become a famous painter, it's just to make a painting; fame is often quite accidental, and capricious. And fickle. I make a lot of sketches and other little things that no one ever sees; they're not good enough to share, period. (The only reason you'll ever see early drafts or sketch versions is because I'm interested in the creative process for its own sake, and I sometimes like to examine a piece from inception to completion to see what happens during the process.)

For my recent art installation, "The Temple of Deep Time" (one of ten corn crib installations at Silverwood County Park), I had an overall conception, an early and immediate vision that I had when I first visited Silverwood, and saw the spiral tree rounds and the corn cribs there, and the end result was in fact very close to the original vision, and written proposal. And in order to get to completion, I had to use almost all of my skills as a creative person (the use of combinations of which is the very definition of "multimedia"), including: graphic design, computer work, photography, drawing, carpentry, math skills, a little bit of programming (in collaboration), getting up on ladders and doing construction, weaving, lighting design, electrical wiring, laser and solar technology, research into weather and solar annual variations, music composition, recording studio production skills, illustration, typography, paper arts, woodworking, calligraphy, and more. Even with this list, I've probably left something out.

So all of that went into making this art installation. And I did it all in about six or seven weeks, from inception to completion. (With a few details added later.) and last night I spent several hours doing long-exposure night photography (which I have taught) and HD video, to document the night-time aspects of my art installation, The Temple of Deep Time. The piece is about time, in multiple ways, on several layers, from past to future. Every element and aspect of the piece is a meditation on time, in some way. That is why I included a laser light show, and a music playback system: music is a timebound art, it has duration, then it ends. Music is an artform you cannot experience without time. It's only appropriate that it both in or porters time-bound arts as part of its design, and also requires being documented over time, using time-shifting as well as time-bound technologies. I will at some point do a time-lapse video of the installation, as well.

To make this art installation I used many skills beyond those (assumed to be) reserved for fine art. In truth, I don't draw a strong distinction between making things and making art.

All of this is why Maker seems to suit what I do better than Artist. If we must have labels or titles or categories. Honestly, labels and categories are for theory, which serves to describe what has been made. But I don't think about any of this when I'm making. I just Make.

Novels Are Not Non-Linear Enough

(This rumination was inspired by an essay by Jim Murdoch on how long it should take to write a novel.)

I love reading novels, although I think the ideal length for a novel is the novella, and most of what we get these days is pretty bloated. I read and re-read certain authors on a regular basis, and many of these are authors of novels. I'm pretty much always reading at least one or two novels at any given time. I read faster than most people, I have discovered, so I can read a lot more than many people do. I read broadly, with no loyalty to any genre of novel-length fiction except that which excites, illuminates, stimulates, and surprises.

I'm drawn to Virginia Woolf's least "narrative" novels, such as "The Waves," but also to "To the Lighthouse," one of the greatest novels ever written about the tension between the artist's temperament and the non-artist's inability to comprehend that temperament. I've read all of James Joyce, and most of Samuel Beckett. I've read all of E.M. Forster multiple times. I watch Doctor Who. I read theoretical physics, for fun, and because I'm interested in it and can understand the concepts if not all of the math. Richard Feynman is not over my head, but that's mostly because he was such a gifted teacher and thinker. I've read many of Michael Moorcock's books, including his literary criticism essays. I've read pretty much all of Nikos Kazantzakis, fiction and non-fiction alike, drawn to it because of his courageous encounters with the unknown mysteries that some call mysticism and others call existentialism. I read Peter Matthiessen's novels as well as his creative nonfiction, since he is a master of both. I read all of Jim Harrison's books, finding a voice therein that I feel kinship to out of similar experience and background, who is also different enough that I am stimulated with new ideas and directions of thought.

I read a lot of novels. Yet I don't read many bestsellers, as I find them very predictable. I don't many thrillers, which is what we call adrenaline-inducing suspense fiction written in the very plain "no-style style" of naturalistic narrative nowadays. And I don't read much "literary fiction," the genre of "naturalistic" fiction set in the present day, usually set in The Big City, that defines itself as being the only genre of narrative fiction that is not in fact a "genre" (as opposed to those categories booksellers use to help you find the books easier on their shelves: mystery; science fiction; self-help; etc.). In most thrillers and many mystery novels I usually figure out Whodunit well before it's revealed to the reader; the only time I don't know in advance of the reveal is when the perpetrator is deliberately concealed behind a screen of distractions, as I find most Agatha Christie type of mystery novels to do. I find John D. McDonald's and Raymond Chandler's mystery novels to be far more compelling, because they are character-driven rather than puzzle-driven, wherein sometimes their plots aren't very linear, their heroes and villains neither one-dimensional nor easily predictable. In most mainstream literary fiction, I am drawn to the outliers (Matthiessen, Kazantzakis, etc.) almost because they are considered outliers, a little bit odd, not quite in the mainstream. I was originally drawn to the Beats for the combined reasons that they were literary outlaws, and because several of them were openly practicing homosexuals. We find our (literary) role models where we can.

I do like to read stylistically experimental fiction (William S. Burroughs, Samuel R. Delany, Richard Brautigan, etc.), and metafiction (Jorge Luis Borges, etc.), but not because it's obscure and difficult—indeed, if I find it to be obscure mostly for the sake of being obscure, a kind of stylistc mannerism rather than form dictated by content, I throw it away—but because experimental fiction uses language poetically, in ways that shapeshift your mind into different ways of perceiving and experiencing reality. (Which is something that science fiction written from an alien species' viewpoint does too, at its best.) I like to experience thinking from inside the alien mind, even if that alien is a human from a different culture, or from a radically different psychology. I like to be surprised, and to experience new ways of thinking, of being.

So I read a lot of speculative fiction—which is usually called science fiction, or fantasy—because it puts your inside a completely different way of thinking about life better than any other literary genre. Speculative fiction is by definition a literature of ideas. Speculative fiction at its best gets my emotions engaged, because it is still telling a human story, even those told at a distance of centuries in the future, which actually is no more alien a territory than the profoundly human stories given us by Shakespeare centuries in the past. I've heard some critics argue convincingly that some of Shakespeare actually could be called science fiction, for the same reasons that Mary Shellley's "Frankenstein" is considered by many to be the first modern science fiction novel: fabulist tales told of incredible and amazing adventures in places not quite real, either in time or space, in which human beings act out the archetypes of story which such gripping writing that we are captivated and find ourselves mirrored in those distant and strange lives. Speculative fiction engages my intellect and sense of wonder, as well, because it is the literature of ideas. Sometimes it can be literally "wow!" mind-blowing, and you finish a novel that makes you think about things in ways you never had before. It can literally "change your mind," if you're receptive and open to that.

I read a lot of "regional" fiction, stories in specific times and places, stories written by writers strongly associated with particular places on the North American continent that happen to be neither New York City nor Los Angeles, the self-involved centrifugal linear accelerators of anointed Literary Establishment mainstream linear narrative novel writing. I like to read stories in places I know well, places I have lived in, places I love; places like San Francisco (which is always a character in any movie filmed there), Wyoming, New Mexico, Chicago, Ann Arbor, the Great Lakes region including Michigan's Upper Peninsula and Wisconsin. Fiction set in places where you nod your head in recognition of both name-checked street names and locations, and the habits and customs of the local inhabitants. Of course, by this criterion New York City fiction is very much a regional fiction sub-genre (albeit often a very provincial one), and so is fiction set in Los Angeles. One of the things that draws me to "regional fiction" is, again, that it is marginal, not in the mainstream of the East Coast Literary Establishment. I have lived a significant portion of my life in the "flyover zone" between New York and Los Angeles, and I find that writers living and writing from within the heartlands of the continent often have much more to say to me than do writers of the New England or Southern California literary circles.

I also read a lot of shorter fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction. I probably read (and write) more essay and poetry than anything else.

So I read a lot of novels.

But of all literary forms, the one I am least, LEAST interested in writing is a novel.

Some of that is because I'm not patient enough to want to write something that might years to complete. It's not that I don't work at making art, and work hard at it, and give my complete concentration and dedication to everything I write. It's that I like seeing a project completed, and another one begun. As a writer, the creative process is what engages me, more than does the artistic product.

And there is also the issue of my fundamental mindset: I simply don't think in terms of narrative. I am science-trained and can think very logically and sequentially, but perhaps that's the problem: a carefully constructed linear plot doesn't engage me very deeply because it's too easy to skip ahead logically and figure it out in advance. I don't even think in terms of linear time (between theoretical physics, a lot of reading in mysticism, and Doctor Who, my experience of time hasn't been linear in a very long time), so making a story conform to the norms of a linear narrative simply does not work for me. I liked how Richard Brautigan used to break up narrative into small vignettes, not always strung together in linear sequence. I like Kerouac's stream-of-consciousness in books such as "Big Sur" and "The Dharma Bums," which is more like Virginia Woolf than anything on the New York Times bestseller lists. As a writer, I have no natural "feel" for plot, narrative, or even linear time.

I am not really a storyteller. Well, I am, because every teller of stories is a storyteller, but I'm not a "storyteller" in any conventional meaning of the term. Thomas Merton was a storyteller, so was Kazantzakis, but their stories were told in ways that no one invested in linear narrative fiction would ever really like. The kinds of stories I most like to tell, or to hear, loop around and around themselves, explore ideas from multiple directions, and step "outside" the linear narrative to look at it from a different angle. (Samuel R. Delany's "Empire Star" is a science fiction space opera that does this unlike almost any other, expanding the narrative viewpoint from straightforward linear narration to multiply-layered causal time-loops that drive the original story by making it happen after it had happened.) So when I act as a storyteller, I almost always get bad feedback from people who want easy, linear, narrative stories—I suspect because on one level they're comforting and affirming, a hedge against the chaos of life that gives comfort by giving chaos structure and order and narrative.

Yet Virginia Woolf said, and experience has brought me to emphatically agree: “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end." E.M. Forster in most of his fiction has some sense of unexplainable mystery, a break in the ordinary plot of everyday life, which often cannot be explained but which always has a profound effect on the people involved, from his "The Story of a Panic" culminating in "A Passage to India." Beckett, well, Beckett is actually very funny, people miss that about his writing; but it's gallows humor, hospital humor, the humor of those who have survived the unthinkable void at the center of destroyed lives and need to laugh because it's better than crying. Joyce experimented with stream of consciousness, but in a different direction than Woolf; some say he went too far into the terrain of the unreadable, and some have tried to come up with pat explanations for why he might ventured off the edge as they perceive it.

I am having some short stories published early nest year in a literary journal. But really they're prose-poems, and pretty nonlinear. That's how I think, that's how I write. Not in any normative traditional linear narrative style.

But I'm an artist. I'm heavily trained in science, and I know how to think like a scientist, and think logically and sequentially, but I am an artist.

Art is not engineering.

Engineering can be creative. My favorite uncle was an engineer, an inventor, a builder; I helped him build a deck on his house one summer, which he designed himself, and the deck is still there forty years later. He had a very creative attitude towards all aspects of life, which manifested as a problem-solving approach to many things, and which worked.

I see a problem when artists start to think that what they are doing is problem-solving first and foremost. (I see this a LOT among designers and graphic artists, who are also very creative people but whose work tends to consist of more problem-solving than inspiration.)

One of the reasons I don't read many mainstream literary fiction novels is that I find them depressingly predictable, especially the ones oriented more towards plot than character. I find many substitute style for actually having something worth saying. I've read Don DeLillo, I've read John Updike, Saul Bellow, and many other darlings of the East Coast (meaning New York) Literary Establishment.

So I'll probably never write a novel. It's just not a form that works for me as a writer.

Well, actually, I might. I have it in me to write a science fiction novel, maybe two. I've had the basic idea and plot in my head for years, and someday I might write it. I've started writing it two or three times over the years, only to leave it unfinished due to other things becoming more urgent and important.

Novels are generally not non-linear enough for me. The novelistic fiction that I am most drawn to breaks those "rules" of "naturalistic" narrative rather than affirms them. Like certain theoretical physicists and mystics, I view that entire form of linear progressive narrative to itself be a fiction. Or as Doctor Who once said: "People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but ACTUALLY from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey . . . stuff." Yeah. Exactly.

The Hollow Places

That hollow place in you
Left hollow
When something you love has gone
When someone you love has left

Don't let it be filled in too soon
Or with just anything

Keep it open

Don't put a fence around it
But don't let it be filled in too easily

Let it be

Sometimes in the forest of the heart
A pine grows, sometimes a saguaro
But both are trees of the oldest Tree
Whose roots bind yours to
The root of the world

•

And sometimes the dark hollows
Are not a hole of what has been
Lost or gone missing
But a well

A well soon filled from below
By a flood, slow at first rising
Of black water shot with silver stars
The waters of the power under life
The creative force that drives the wold
And waters the roots of that same Tree
In which you yourself are rooted
Wellspring and branch and solace

A Summoning of Fireflies

A new short film.



A Summoning of Fireflies. 2013.

Video, sound & music by Arthur Durkee.

Music: "Summoning" by Arthur Durkee
AD: Animoog, softsynths, bass guitar, live recordings, effects.
All Rights Reserved.

In June, when I was out shooting footage of the wind in the grass, as dusk fell the fireflies began rising from the verge. They pulsed alongside the road ditches, in the trees, and over the fields.

I have spent several evenings this summer filming fireflies at dusk, gathering a lot of good material. This short film is the first in a series.

Queer Art Show in New York City

I was very pleased to participate in this Qweer Arts gallery show in New York City, that was put on by the gallery and RFD Magazine, in celebration of the magazine's new issue featuring lots and lots of great art. I have artwork in the magazine as well (look for Dragon), which is why I was invited to participate in the gallery show. I'm very glad for the opportunity, and very glad I was able to participate.

I sent six works of homoerotic photography and digital art for the gallery show. One work was purchased at the gallery opening, which is very exciting.

So I regard the RFD Magazine "Qweer Arts" show to be a big success. Six prints of my photo-based digital artwork were shown in a gallery in New York City, and one of them was sold! Adding these elements to my artist's resumé brings me a lot of joy.

Thank you.

This is the third gallery show that my work has been shown in, in 2013. I hope this might be viewed as a good omen of Things To Come.

Creativity: Writing, rather than Writing About Writing

This week I have been sorting through piles of books and CDs, deciding what I can live without. I need to thin the herd, lighten the load, divest. Yesterday I unloaded a satchel full of books at a used book store, one friendly to the obscure, the academic, the poetic, the literary.

I realized, in my sorting, that I have over time amassed an entire library on LGBT/queer/gender theory and LGBT history, all these heavy-duty big books written from an academic and philosophical viewpoint. I've read them all, and realize I'm not going to read them again. There are a very few of these that I will keep, as the only ones I'm ever likely to re-read or consult ever again (like John Boswell's books, Martin Duberman's history of Stonewall, etc.). But most of these need to find another home. Yesterday, the used book store took them all in, and will pass them on. (The recycling of ideas.)

But in truth, the more important realization here is: I'm an artist.

To engage with LGBT studies in future for me is to make art about it, rather than to read or write a dissertation about it. Now that I've embraced being an artist, it's time to let go of my academic background.

And one way I do that is to make art about how I respond to LGBT life, rather than to write a theoretical paper about it. Thus, I have a two-page spread of artwork in the current issue of RFD Magazine, in their brand new "Qweer Arts Issue." (And I plan to participate in the art gallery show that is being planned to highlight artists from the issue.)

Writing, rather than writing about writing.

There are limits to the intellectual and academic study and analysis of the way we live our lives. There are limits to talking about it, as opposed to doing it. I went through graduate school. I can actually read and understand these kinds of heavy-duty high-theory academic books. I know the lingo, I know the theories, and I know the history. (I am a data sponge.) I was actually read good in graduate school: I was an excellent, thorough researcher, and a good writer of thesis-like papers. I got good grades, and was well-liked by most of my professors, one or two of whom thought I could be a brilliant scholar in future.

But that's no what happened. Academia, the university as an educational and research institution, has its own rules of survival, "publish or perish" being only the most famous example, that I could not adhere to, in the end. Grad school politics did not engage my heart, and so I did it poorly. Even though I was very good at the scholarly side of academic life, I failed at the political side.

Most importantly, however, I left grad school, I now believe, because I knew on some level, at the time still a pre-verbal level, that I'd rather write music than write about music, I'd rather make art than write about making art. Making art is what I do best. I'm pretty good at writing about making art, too. But I never wanted to be a Critic, an intellectual who analyzes the artwork of others and never makes his own. I know now that I never would have fit in, in academia; I might have been a good teacher, but probably not a good Professor.

I still write about making art and making music, although I write about it because I'm interested in the creative process as a process. I make notes. I leave breadcrumbs. I document and study the process itself, out of fascination. I have written a great deal about the creative process, and the arts. It's one of my main topics as an essayist.

And I enjoy reading what other artists and writers and poets and composers have to say about their own creative processes. (Stephen King's book On Writing is a wonderful book, even if you don't like anything else he writes.) I love that kind of book, and have an entire library of "poets on poetry, writers on writing" sort of books. I have an entire library of John Cage's books.

But I don't want to read another academic book about queer theory, LGBT theory, or theoretical models of queer living, when what I'd rather do is go live life as a creative gay shaman artist poet composer painter, and respond to life lived as an artist instead of an academic.

I have no regrets about the academic period of my life—except perhaps for one: I never should have let anyone convince me that I was supposed to write ABOUT music, rather than writing music. But even that is a minor regret, because it was part of the path that led me to where I am now.

I embrace that I am a maker, not one of those who talks about makers, although I think it's okay for makers to talk about what makers do. I write, rather than write about writers writing. I embrace the paradox that I am writing, now, about writing about writing. But I'm still writing about the creative process, not about the "product" that I produce. I have little interest in telling you how to think about the art I make, or telling you what to believe it means: I'd rather you discovered that on your own.

As the haiku master said, centuries ago: The poem is only fulfilled when the reader completes the poem by bringing his own life-experience to the reading, filling in the gaps with those things we all have in common, just because we are human.

Songwriting: American Roads

Lost Roads (detail), 2011 ongoing

In the past few weeks I've written three new songs, each in a completely different style. Two of them are fully notated for voice and piano, the third is a folk/country song, a kind of shuffle, called "American Roads." I wrote the basic idea for the lyrics a year ago, and set it aside for awhile.

I have three or four additional lyrics in my notebook that are finished and ready to be set to music; plus many more still being worked on. I decided to keep a lyric-writing notebook a year or so ago, after completing Heartlands and continuing to write new songs. With "American Roads," I now have five or six new songs completed and ready to record. That's starting to feel like an album, or at least an EP. I gather them together as they gradually finish themselves, and perhaps will eventually publish a songbook and an album.

Of the three recent songs, one gave me a very difficult time. It took a great deal of work to hammer it into shape, and I felt despair at the writing more than once. In a bit of unintended irony, when it was finished, I gave it the name "Endless." I started out with an idea, and went with it, got a ways into it, then felt stuck. Then there was a breakthrough, a eureka! moment when I figured out what was needed to finish the song. I then had to go back and rewrite the beginning, and still the ending took a long time to get just right. I can look back on it now, and say, this song is actually pretty good. Perhaps only I will ever see the seams where I made changes and fixes.

Meanwhile, in the middle of that difficult process, I suddenly broke away for an afternoon and a completely different song emerged, in a completely different style. "Still/Here" took less than two hours to write down, start to finish, the words and the music emerging at the same time. I only had to change one or two details, in the end, to finish it up and get it done. The results are good, and I've already heard several people say they like this song a lot. It will get performed soon, one way or another. I look forward to that.

During the process of writing these songs, looking at my own creative process, I noted that this writing took so much effort that I was on;y able to sit down and write every other day. One day on, one day of rest, one day on, one day of rest, and so forth. I don't know if that pattern will continue, whether or not it's part of the new normal.

Then I sat down to write "American Roads." As I said, I completely rewrote the lyrics, then sketched out the basic chord changes, melodies, and harmonic ideas. That was all I could get done in one day. I've written this piece as a lead sheet, just melody, chords, and words. The typical song lead sheet, what you find in The Real Book or on a chart for a studio recording session. It's all you get for a lot of folk music, after all, and this song is definitely within my folksong writing zone. With a nod to light country shuffle in it as well.

Here are the first verse and refrain. (Actually, the song structure is two verses and a refrain every time. Technically speaking, then, that's one verse repeated since the pattern is the same.)

•

Put the kettle on the Coleman
and fire up the truck
load up the blankets and the tent
and turn the radio on

I got this urge for going
right off the deep blue end
a corner of a long sky road
going round a bend

Refrain:
American Roads
winding through the heart
some place I’ve never been
American Roads
open wide for me
and take me home again

•

When I was rewriting the lyrics, I noticed that my original idea had two kinds of lyrical elements: first, specific moments, with specific references to places and activities I've experienced on various roadtrips; and second, a more familiar trope found in many folk, bluegrass and country songs, all derived from old-timey roots-music threads, which were thoughts about home and rootlessness, roaming and yearning for home. So when I was rewriting, for each set of two verses before the refrain, the first verse is specific, the second verse more philosophic and universal.

There's also a twist at the end, with a repeated refrain with new words that take the song off in another direction. Common practice in folk covers.

So, there you have. Three new songs in a couple of weeks. Very satisfying.

I have a lot of other tasks to deal with for the next few weeks, and I wrote these to meet an audition and performance deadline. I always write well on deadline. Having a fixed target often gets my creative juices flowing. But at the moment I'm in the mood to keep going, keep writing, see what happens. Perhaps I'll work some more on more songs this coming week, in between other creative projects and Things To Do that I must get done.

Oh, by the way, I do take requests.

Brief Notes about Making Art, and a Digression

In the form of visual memes. Then a digression.



Catharsis in the arts is underrated. Why do people play the blues, or punk rock, or industrial rock? Because it's cathartic. I've played in bands in all those genres, and more, and rehearsals and gigs were almost always cathartic. I was reminded about catharsis a few days ago, when a lot of bottled up emotion around the Christmas holiday season suddenly came spilling out, triggered by a moment of aesthetic beauty. I remembered that I hadn't been making art for the past few days, and had been tied up in knots with the stresses of the winter holiday season. And then I remembered about catharsis, and was forcefully reminded about how making art keeps me grounded, centered, focused, and literally alive. Catharsis is more than just a pressure-release valve, it's a change of being, even if only for a moment. Art gives catharsis to the audience as well as the artist. The aesthetic moment that triggered all this was a sequence in a favorite movie that always, always gets to me on a very deep level, triggers an emotional response, and leaves washed clean afterwards, the way a good weep does.

Too many new age and neo-pagan artists are so focused on the light, on growth and healing and reminders to "keep it positive," that they forget that Shiva is both Creator and Destroyer. Parvati must be given her due, but so must Kali.

Sometimes you just have to get the darkness out of you by putting it into your art. The Wrathful Deities must have their due.



Art needs to be discursive, digressive, and distracted. All the best art takes you away somewhere, creates a new reality for you to wade around in, be immersed in. Art is nonlinear and even irrational. And that is its strength, and as it should be. Because that is what imagination is. Imagination is anarchic, not rational. Making art must be a journey for the artist as well as the audience, a free exploration of undiscovered and unfamiliar trails.



Life is messy, so is art.

Making art requires improvisation and intuition and inspiration, and not being in control, and not knowing what you're doing, or where you're being led.

Life is an improvisation, a guessing game at times. So is making art. Fingerpainting as well as technical pens. Disorder and chaos as another condition of orderliness. Dionysus and Apollo both.

•



And a digression:

Why do I share some of my art online? I think of it as advertising. Marketing for my arts business, as well as for fun. And I usually share only bits and pieces, and not the actual piece at full size. For that, or a print, people need to visit my online store.

Why don't we respect our artists? Because we have been convinced that art is a hobby, or that we don't need it to survive. Wrong on both counts, of course, but what do you expect from a culture that avoids self-reflection as much as possible, in favor of the loud and brassy self-display of narcissism and mannerism and self-absorption? When was the last time you shared something on your Facebook wall that was for the sake of others, and not basically a form of self-advertising? If you can honestly say, yesterday, then gods bless you.

So why do artists self-advertise online? Finding their audience. Your niche audience can be anywhere in the world, now, and at last you can connect with them. Calling that narcissism seems like a category error, though, because it's about the art, not about you. Note the subtle difference.



Every week I get requests from strangers to use my art for their website for free. These days I mostly say No. Folks, I am trying to make a living from my art.

Can I stop someone from stealing and using an image of mine online? No, but I can remind them that I probably worked as hard to make that piece of art they just "borrowed" as they did to earn their weekly paycheck. Maybe harder, because there's no downtime in art-making, and you never take a vacation. So I can't stop the thieves, but I also won't let them make me paranoid, and I'll continue to share some of my art, to find my audience, to make connections, and to let people know the art is there. Our culture pays lawyers hundreds of dollars an hour, and artists nothing, that's where our priorities really lie, and actions always speak louder than words.

But you can only buy my art from me.

If you like what any given artist creates, support them by buying their art, rather than stealing it or "borrowing" it. I got one of those freebie requests in my email today. I'm thinking about how to respond. I'm thinking out loud.

Thanksgiving Gratitudes

One of the things I am grateful for, thankful for, despite all the pain and suffering it took to get me to the point of understanding—the many detours and wrong turns, the early knowledge and adult denials, denials for the sake of propriety and trying to please others, and ending with gratitude even for the horrific medical journey I've been on that culminated in surgery and recovery—is this:

Everything else stripped away, I at least know and accept now that my purpose in life is to make art.

Create. Make things. Write. Make music. Poems. Photography. Digital visionary and shamanic art. Paint. To make art.

It's what I'm best at doing, possibly the only thing I'm really any good at doing. It was what I was born to do.

I knew this when I was a boy, but then everything in life, and almost everyone, conspired to convince me I was wrong, that I could never succeed at being a composer or artist. That I had to find a "real" job. And I believed them. Or enough parts of me were beaten into that belief that I started to sabotage my own artistic success, by doubt and fear and self-created drama.

Enough. Maybe I'll never "succeed" as an artist, by becoming a wealthy and famous composer or writer or artist, but at least I've stopped fighting the core truth: making art is what I'm supposed to do.

Doesn't mean it will always be easy, or pain-free, but having a purpose goes a long way towards making the rest of life bearable.

I'm thankful for knowing what I'm FOR.

I hope you know that about yourself, too.



Thank You for the gift of beautiful and artful things
For the gift of being able to appreciate and enjoy them
For the gift of being able to make them
For the tools and materials and skills used to make them
And for the friends to enjoy making alongside
And for the friends to enjoy them along with

I think it was probably the life-threatening, near-death experiences I've been through recently—during which a lot of nonessential things got pared away, leaving the core of who I am—that this clarity about my purpose came life was able to emerge. A lot of useless drama in my life has fallen away. I have a heightened sense of my own mortality, the limited time on this earth to get done what I want to get done.

It was also a wake-up call to convert some old bad self-defeating habits into a more positive focus on what is possible rather than what was lost. That's still a new thing, still a fragile bit of learning. I have to remind myself to be positive rather than defeatist, most days. At the same time, I find I have less and less patience for those things and people that seem purposed towards wasting my time and energy. Awareness of your own mortality can heighten your impatience about wasting time. Stated more positively, I'll never be bored again. I have no time for boredom. There's too much to do, and I want to do it all.



Asked recently to write a short bio to accompany a set of my poems being published, I acknowledged this new awareness.

Arthur Durkee has finally woken up to the truth that his purpose in life is to Make Things: be an artist, a composer, poet, musician, painter, photographer, songwriter, landscape sculptor, book artist, videographer, etc. This realization came on the heels of a long illness, near-death experience, surgery, and recovery. Creative work is what he does best, and best loves doing; in fact, it's the only thing he's really good at. He's tried a lot of other jobs, from corporate to retail, and never excelled at any of them. He does still dabble for fun in freelance design and illustration for books and magazines, and creating art for musicians, such as posters and CDs. He observes the world from a slight angle, with an artist's eye and a bard's ear, and gives it back within new frames of focus. We are but mirrors and we marvel.

Songwriting: Influences

When you list your influences as a songwriter, everyone who reads such lists has certain expectations, expectations which have become clichéd. Even defying the usual expectations has become clichéd; for example, when a songwriter cites as influence "a flowery meadow," or plays a game of reversals.

Never having myself been a member of the Cult of Dylan or the Cult of Cohen, you won't find their names on my songwriting influences list. That's not to deny giving Bob his due as an occasionally unique and brilliant songwriter, with a knack for a turn of phrase both memorable and fresh. But he's not an influence on my songwriting.

There are a lot of songwriters you learn from, that you can learn craft from by looking at their material, learning their songs, analyzing the scores, just listening. I learn a great deal about songwriting by looking at songs. That's just going to school. But that doesn't mean those songwriters become your influences.

No, your influences are those songs and songwriters that get under your skin, that get at your guts, where you go, "I want to do that!" Not imitate, though imitation is often where we learn to start to write, but incorporate. Some sensibility, or mood, or way of looking at the world you never experienced or imagined before. Songwriters who have influenced me have all had a moment for me, or many moments, where I got lost inside the worlds they created, inhabited those worlds, and started writing about those worlds myself, using my own words and music to respond from inside those worlds.

It's about being haunted. Haunting worlds created inside a song, and being yourself haunted by what you found there. That's the stuff that gets inside your bones and blood, and even though the new songs you write may be nothing like those ones the influenced you musically or lyrically, there's a ghost in there that took up lodging in your chest and still sings through your lungs, using your body as its shell to sing its songs.

It's a hungry host kind of haunting, that won't leave you in peace, but requires you to keep on singing. Eventually you learn that music is the alchemy of survival, just as art is the alchemy of life, transforming suffering into something that can be endured. Just.

One of my influences, by this definition, as a songwriter is John Dowland, the great Elizabethan composer and lutenist and songwriter.

In the alchemical transaction that is music, doing the blues, singing and playing about the worst things in life, makes you feel better. Making music about despair, death, horror, suffering, love lost, loneliness,violation, pain, all that paradoxically helps you feel less alone, feel better. Some days the blues are the only thing that keeps you going. They give you a reason to get through the night, when there isn't any other.

John Dowland wrote the Elizabethan blues. They still help us keep going.

Here are the lyrics to what is still one of the greatest songs by one of the greatest songwriters ever: "Flow, My Tears," by John Dowland:

Flow, my tears, fall from your springs!
Exiled for ever, let me mourn;
Where night's black bird her sad infamy sings,
There let me live forlorn.

Down vain lights, shine you no more!
No nights are dark enough for those
That in despair their lost fortunes deplore.
Light doth but shame disclose.

Never may my woes be relieved,
Since pity is fled;
And tears and sighs and groans my weary days
Of all joys have deprived.

From the highest spire of contentment
My fortune is thrown;
And fear and grief and pain for my deserts
Are my hopes, since hope is gone.

Hark! you shadows that in darkness dwell,
Learn to contemn light
Happy, happy they that in hell
Feel not the world's despite.

A Painting Journal

Aurorae, acrylic on paper, 2012

A painting journal

Trying something semi-new. Keeping a journal as I paint. Writing down thoughts in the pauses between painting during a session. Just as a record of the creative process.

Listening to music, while I paint, on random shuffle on iTunes on my laptop. Keep in mind that on my studio computer, my iTunes library can now play for over 190 days continuously, with no repeats. All kinds of music, truly random.

•

Thursday, November 8
4:16 PM

Feel like painting today. There is sunlight streaming in for the first time in weeks. There’s one painting that I want to finish, now.

Don't be afraid to paint over something you liked before, but which didn't work for this painting. I am finding myself wanting to finish one of the “Lights” (Aurora Borealis) series of paintings today, after having it set aside for weeks. I have the iTunes music library on shuffle, listening to random pieces while painting. All over the avant-classical pop rock map. Copland to Patsy Cline to books on CD to Kate Bush.

Several layers of dry rush blue night sky, over existing backgrounds. Then the luminosity of the aurorae themselves. Lots of edge softenings, nuances, translucencies.

Even though I started this painting with bold geometric shapes, I've moved away towards something more fractal, more natural. Follow the brush. Bold and solid under layers yield to thinner, translucent, feathered upper layers. It looks better that way.

Because of the way I'm painting right now, or because of the abstract-realist subject matter, I find myself using large flat brushes. Angled strokes, really rather calligraphic. Sometimes the brushtrokes form lines and surfaces like geographic texture underneath the more visible layers.

Peter Gabriel to science fiction soundtrack creepiness. “He's got a ray gun!” Melodic punk Bob Mould. Zen shakuhachi.

The painting darkens but the lights still shine through.

•

Thursday, November 8
4:46 PM

The next layers will lighten the painting up again. Let the dark over-layers dry for awhile. Then continue. Often I don't let the acrylics totally dry, because I do like the slight mixing that happens when you dry brush paint over a still slightly wet layer. The same kind of mixing that happens in nature, layers of sedimentary rock feathering and mixing together as they form, bleeding color from minerals leaching into the matrix.

Continuing to photograph each painting in progress, with the idea of using these closeups and sectional photos of color and brushstroke as painted stock backgrounds. Might even create and sell CDs of original stock on my own, of these my own materials. Why not? No one else has them, because no one else has these paintings in progress.

Photographing the painting in progress is also a way of looking at it, contemplating it, looking more closely.

Quick sunset of oncoming winter. There goes the last of the natural light. Even in the failing light, though, continuing to paint, kitchen lights turned on now.

Sometimes the texture of the paper still comes through, as do the lines of brushstrokes on lower layers.

Of course lighting affects mood. Color does as well. Despite what the neuroscientists claim, I don't think that's hardwired, I think it still has some culturally-bound factors. A lot of neuroscientists are not even aware that their own fundamental assumptions about what they observe are culturally-bound; unaware that their cultural bias is Western-scientific; as opposed to, for example, Inuit-mythic or Hindu-Buddhist-cosmological. Is a fish aware that it’s breathing water?

Color palette and language are not the same from culture to culture. What is held in common are the perceived colors of natural world objects. Red berries on forest plants around the world are poisonous often enough to humans to be of note. But there is no equivalent color in the northern Midwest to the color of young rice in the paddies, that unique yellow-green. So what we associate with those colors has at minimum some cultural input and conditioning with regards to how we interpret colors as emotions.

Yet I’m a North American, born on Turtle Island, and my roots for this kind of painting that I find myself doing are in Kandinsky and other branches of early Modernism, from the period before Modernism went ultra-rational, began to worship logical-positivism, and threw away all of its early vestiges of both irrationality and mysticism.

People forget that some of the key branches of early Modernism were deep explorations of the newly-theorized unconscious self, the realm of dreams and myths and archetypes; that got discarded in favor of rational utilitarianism. Not always an equal tradeoff. What the expressive color, the color of expression, in my painting means might mean what it means only to me, but as Kandinsky notes, if the experience of viewing the painting evokes an emotional, or mythopoetic, response in the viewer, all is good.

Laurie Anderson runs into Coldplay. Then 40s pop hits. A favorite slow movement from a Vivaldi cello concerto. Truly random music choices. The BBC Radio drama of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

Rest awhile. Make some more photos of the painting. Think about starting dinner.

•

Thursday, November 8
5:16 PM

I'm not remotely tired of photographing these paintings as I make them. It's not really about recording the process, more about watching change. Each working period yields a new painting. The painting you start with is not always like the painting you end with, and it might change several times during the process. Eventually it tells you when it's done, and you stop.

That's something a lot of my non-artist friends never seem to understand: listening to what the work tells you it wants. Non-artists all too often think art-making is all a conscious act of will, as though it were all planned out, pre-designed, engineered to the artist’s willful blueprint. Well, sometimes you do start out that way, but it almost never ends up exactly as you pre-visualized. It moves. It always has a will of its own. The artist doesn't control things as much as people think. There's a lot of intuition involved.

One of the things that makes a lot of current postmodern art so dry and emotionally flat, and often frankly boring, is precisely a lack of intuition, with too much conscious intent and control. Trust me, I've worked in advertising art and commercial design and illustration, where you are in fact working to a goal, an outline, a conscious intent. Art with a purpose, art intended to pass on a specific message. It's often still creative and fun, and sometimes even nuances, but it's not art that’s meant to endure. It’s meant to be seen once, clearly convey its message, then the reader moves on. Most art you see in magazines is like that. You don't desire to keep coming back to it, to look at it again and absorb it.

When I look at a Jeff Koons piece, for example, it's often very clever and flashy and interesting, really eye-catching and fun. But once I've seen it, I’m done with it. There’s no lingering. Looking at it a second time, I shrug. There is no desire to come back. It's commercial illustration writ large, and what it lacks is precisely that emotional intuition (Kandinsky again) that I find myself seeking from my own paintings. I don't tire of looking at them, or making photos of them.

Probably most artists feel this way about their own work, so it's hardly a revelation, I imagine. If it didn’t interest you as an artist, you wouldn’t return to it, or to doing it.

October Project. A movie soundtrack. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Cowpunk ditties. "I hate to wake up sober in Nebraska." Music rolling on.

Pause to make dinner. Ravel solo piano music.

•

Friday, November 9
11:45 AM

Now we lighten up the colors again, so they emerge from the dark, glowing. Red glows over green.

Thinking ahead, planning ahead, envisioning in advance with the mind’s eye, what photographer Edward Weston called “pre-visualization,” is something I learned to do years ago as a graphic designer. You keep the goal in mind. You can hit the mental undo button to go back a step if necessary. You visualize what the end result will look like, and you approach that visualization even if you never quite match it in the real world. Imagination remains more malleable, in the end.

Working in layers on a painting, adding layers over layers, is for me analogous to working in layers in Photoshop. You know what's above and below, what masks and what shows through, how they interact. There is a similar sense of happy accident, the indeterminacy I often like to see in all the art I do. Being surprised as the artist is one of the things I love about the process. Discovery. The mystery of an unplanned but even better outcome.

Thinking about this further, layers are natural to me because they are prominent in my music, and the music I play and listen to. All those years spent playing Javanese gamelan, which is layered cycles of melody and heterophony. The influence of the Indonesian music I've studied and played on how I play in a jazz or rock combo setting, in which I also tend to think in layers. Avant-garde classical music and jazz, often structured similarly. I'm thinking of Steve Reich's cyclic gradual process music, and also more recently of Nik Bartsch and his ensemble Ronin, in which the tension between layers of melody and rhythmic cycles is integral to the music.

The underlayers of the painting show through in parts, in textures underneath, even when the pigments are covered over or mostly so. Remnants. Memories. Little bits of the past. Every painting is a history as well as a fact.

•

Saturday, November 10
12:34 PM

Recently acquired the special edition DVD of Ed Harris' movie "Pollock," which is an excellent biopic about the artist Jackson Pollock, unsentimental and deeply moving. It’s not a psychoanalysis of Pollock, it’s a presentation of his life. The most interesting and intense parts of the movie are the scenes in which we see the artist at work, creating. To do this role, Harris learned how to paint. He built a studio behind his house, and began to learn. The paintings seen in the film are re-creations of Pollocks, made by the film studio art department, but also worked on by Harris on camera. This is one of the most realistic depictions of a painter in the films: there’s no faking it.

Watching Harris paint as Pollock painted, in character but also DOING the paintings is enthralling. You can see that the actor has absorbed how the painter moved, physically, which gives a strong clue to how he painted. This is a simply terrific film. It inspires me to take up the brushes again today and work some more.

Painting is becoming something that, once I've started doing it, becomes self-sustaining. I still have trouble with all the labels around art: painter, artist, etc. I'd rather than just do it than have a label I have to wear like a name badge. So I still don't think of myself as A Painter, I just paint. I’m happy to say I paint, and leave it at that.

•

Monday, November 12
2:07 PM

This painting is now finished. No title yet, though I do know it’s part of the aurora borealis series. Call it simply “Aurorae” for now. I’ll put it up on the bedroom wall with the other painting, and continue to grow the cluster of paintings there, adding color to my room’s most empty wallspace.

Finished. Rather, I don't know what else to do with it. The end result is a bit darker than I had envisioned, nonetheless it's saturated with rich color. There are a lot of details here I like. Brushstrokes like waves of light and air.

Poet Paul Valery once opined, "A poem is never finished, only abandoned." I feel some of that now. This painting is abandoned. I feel the need to go on, to work on other paintings. To do something new and unknown. To improvise.

In painting as in poetry, there comes a point after which more revision won't fix anything, and often makes things worse. I once was boggled to hear that a poet was teaching her writing workshop students that she sometimes revised a poem sixty times. I frankly find that either unbelievable or pathetic. If it takes that long to "fix" a piece of art, chances are you never will. Either it has defeated you already, or you've gotten stuck.

I don't feel that way about this painting, it just feels done. Abandoned, maybe, or perhaps it’s just telling me that it’s done. I don't know what else to do with it. I'm satisfied. I'm ready to move on to the next piece.

Make Art

The guidelines for the beginning of survival. The mantra for coping when you can't really cope because you're overwhelmed and exhausted all the time. The method of staying sane when it's a real challenge.

Make art. Record music. Write a poem. Make art.

When upset, make art. When sad, make art. When angry at situations or the stupid people involved in certain situations, make art. When tired of talking about problems, record music. When you can't face that stack of letters and bills and other things that make you crazy to think about, even though you know you'll have to deal with them eventually, make art. Always prioritize for art.

Although in some ways my health has radically improved in the last just-over-a-year since the surgery, I'm still recovering. I was sick for twenty years, I'm not going to bounce back in six months. I still tire out unpredictably. When too exhausted to do anything but feel frustrated and weepy, make art. The last few days I've been as exhausted as I used to be when I was really sick, and anemic. I just can't get it started. So make art.

When nothing else works and you're totally stuck and can't see your way out to ever getting out of whatever hell you find yourself in again, make art. Make art. Make art.

Songwriting: Polishing and Revision

I woke this morning with the urge to write. I wasn't feeling very verbal, though; having spent time late last night laying down tracks in the recording studio, that's not a big surprise; I've known for a long time that when the music is flowing, the poetry tends to be quiescent. Still, I felt like writing. So I pulled out my song lyrics workbook and my journal and poetry sketchbooks, and worked on revising some sketches into a coherent song lyric.

That's the process that works for me: write it down while the images and words are coming. Revise later. I know some poets and other writers who revise as they write, but that has never worked for me. In fact, it can even block the flow, and make what comes out all too cerebral. For me, it's "Spew now, edit later" that works best.

Sometimes a poem comes out almost fully-formed, and needs only a few changes to polish it up. For me that's actually fairly common. That's partly because I don't push the river, I let it flow however it will. My writing discipline is not to try to force myself to write every day, to meet some workshop-defined ideal of productivity or daily practice. My discipline is to always be listening, always be ready, always have my tools at hand, so that when something does come forward to be written down, I'm always ready to do so. I don't write every day, and I don't try to. Experience has taught me that my writing discipline achieves more or less the same quantity and quality of good results as poets I know whose discipline is to write a couple hours every day; so which is the better practice? Neither. It's just different means to similar ends. I've met a few poets who seem baffled that their writing discipline isn't what everyone else does, or should do, and they particularly have a hard time understanding why I can write a good poem in a first or second draft when I don't write every day.

So, sometimes a poem comes out fully-formed. Sometimes a poem, or a song lyric, comes out in very rough form, with good images, but the words are all over the place, incoherent, and unformed. It's like throwing paint at the wall: sometimes you get the outline of an image, but it's not yet fully-formed. In such cases what often works for me is to revise by writing-through the words again. The cinematic flow of the images may be the same, even in the same order, although not always, but the words might be completely new and different, or assembled from the scraps in your sketch, in your journal. Sometimes I come back to things I wrote months or years ago, on these mornings when I want to write but don't feel very verbal. Every writer probably has a file of random ideas written down that were never developed, to dip into when the urge to write is there, but words aren't coming into one's mind the way they usually do.

This morning I went back in my journal and found some scraps of poem and image that I had written months ago, and re-formed them into a provisional song lyric. It probably needs more polishing, another revision or two, still.

I thought the process might be interesting, by way of example.

•

On a roadtrip through the Southwest last winter, I spent the night in Winnemucca, NV, which is a truck stop town on Hwy. 80 in a desert region of the Basin & Range. It's a good place to stop if you're driving across country, and there are hotels and restaurants there to support the custom. I spent the night there at the end of February 2012, on my way back home from California; the next day I got as far as Salt Lake City, then up to Jackson, WY, for a couple of days spent photographing in the Grand Tetons.

That night in Winnemucca a desert windstorm came through. The wind howled at the doorsill all night long. I stuffed towels around the edges of the window and door, but the room still smelled of alkaline desert dust, triggering my allergies. A couple of rain troughs were torn off the eaves during the night, and the trash cans were knocked over and blown down the line. Everyone in the hotel was on edge all night long, alert in our rooms to every sound, occasionally peering out between our window curtains to make sure our vehicles were okay.

In the morning, it was still window, but no longer howling. Puffy dark clouds filled the skies all day, making light and shadow patterns on the land all around, a mottled, piebald look. I wrote what follows in my journal the morning after the night-long storm; you can see how it's unformed, not really even a poem, just some impressions and phrases, ideas and images. So here's a good example of a bad poem from my own journal. I present it, unedited, for the purpose of demonstrating how a little revision and polishing can make a huge difference.

howling wind outside door
begging to get in
long night terrors
in morning's light dispelled
but hiding still behind
low swift-groaning clouds

raven in the dead grass
hovers wind-whipped and inarticulate
silent this morning
all thought drowned in wind

picture mountains
mottled by day and cloud-shadow
gray, tan and dun
snow-crowned, isolate
red side-walls canyoned with ice
picture them groaning
with pines bent over
giving birth to wind

•

sage winter white
palest aqua
solitary tree gold branched
against darker brown hills

raven hovers in swift wind
floating above sea of grass

•

last night I feared the wind
would trap me, the snow keep me
locked into a dream of sterile
hotel room, frozen, unable to venture out

now midday wind robs
the day of heat, freezing
but the mountains and clouded clay
are beautiful, and all moves as it would

•

trails of light
written by wind on stone

I wince to read that now. Not a few lines are pretentious and puerile, the language removed from the experience and fond of its own smartness—which is exactly the sort of crap I produce when I try to force myself to write, rather than go with the flow. (Which is why I don't write that way.) Words I'd never actually use in a finished piece. There are a few turns of phrase that show promise, but more that don't.

This is why we ought to leave such things in our journals, and never present them as finished poems. I do agree with some poetry critics that a lot of poems presented these days aren't finished, aren't revised enough, and are basically just journal-poems. The Beatific advice to write "first thought, best thought" actually only works if you're already an experienced bard, long-trained in poetics, and long-practiced in poetic improvisation.

Although this excerpt from my journal isn't good on its own, I see a kernel of something that could be good buried in it, if I can just tease it out, rework it, and make it something a little more focused and concise.

When I'm writing a song lyric, a key emotion or image is what makes the refrain, the image or phrase you come back to between verses. It needs to anchor the entire song. Sometimes the anchor can be the music, but when the song has a refrain, rather than just a recurring structure, you need to make sure the refrain has some of the strongest words or images in the entire lyric. This morning, I read through this material from my journal, and saw that the image that kept recurring was a raven hovering in the wind over a patch of dead brown grass. That was something I'd seen during the high winds, an image that stayed with me. So, let's take that and make it into the key image of the revised song lyric.

Also, on purely technical grounds, when I am writing a song lyric rather than a poem, I tend to count syllables-per-line, usually in a pattern of longer line followed by shorter. That pattern of variation also fits with much of melody I hear in my mind when writing song lyrics. It's mostly intuitive, not planned out far in advance. (I'm reporting here on what I observe of my own tendencies, not dictating music-theoretical rules.) Whether or not there is an end-rhyme, whether or not you are using meter of one kind or another, counting syllables gives you a framework to hang the imagery on. I prefer counting syllables to using formal metrics, as I think it's more flexible and fluid, and allows you to occasionally vary the count and stress of a line, and be able to throw in an extra syllable where needed. I strongly dislike iambic pentameter because few modern poets do it without making it sound sing-song and clichéd, so I avoid pentameter in my song lyrics. Yet since the English language is built on stressed and unstressed words, you can't really avoid using iambs per se; but you don't have to use them in rigid forms, you can be loose and improvisatory wherever possible. Especially when combing words with melody. Setting words to music changes all the rules—something poets ought to remember, although few get past their internalized formal prejudices to be able to do so.

Song lyrics tend to be more formal than "pure" poetry, especially in this age of free verse and organically-emerging poetic form, and by necessity: repetitive pattern assists memorization. There's reason the ballad form is so common in folk music: the pattern of word-stress and melody makes ballads memorable. So when I am writing a song lyric, or in this case polishing up some otherwise loose material into a song lyric, I tend to find ways to say it within the syllabic form. You can't always shoehorn a long poetic line into a form, sometimes you have to sacrifice it. When you're revising and polishing, you need to let go of what you've written in order to make better what you're about to write. You can't afford to cling to even your own words; you sometimes have to be brutal.

With all that in mind, this morning I produced what follows, which is a more structured and formal, and I think better, piece of writing: a song lyric which I will eventually set to music. It still needs some more revision, I think, and some individual word-choices haven't been settled yet, but overall I hope this can serve as an example of the revising and polishing process.

raven floats in morning wind
above a sea of grass

howling wind outside my door
begging to get in
long night terrors, fury's call
gone in morning light
linger still behind these clouds
moving fast and tight

raven silent in the sky
all sound drowned in wind

picture mountains gray and dun
bare tree on the ridge
piebald sun and shadow cloud
red side-wall canyons iced
picture groaning pines bent down
giving birth to wind