Why Genre Fiction Is Better Than Mainstream Fiction

That title is my opening salvo, bound to be contested by writers invested in believing that the mainstream literary realistic fiction that they compose is not itself actually a genre. It is a genre: the genre that refuses to label itself as such. Because to do so would mean that it is not inherently superior to the "genre fiction" so derided by critics, and self-anointed Literary Critics & Arbiters Of Taste, who deal only with mainstream literary realistic fiction.

Mainstream literary linear-narrative fiction is a genre. It just happens to be the privileged genre. Privilege is where you don't have to defend your existence, and wherein your tropes and idiosyncrasies are taken as normative rather than highlighted as Other, as exotic. It is the no-genre genre, often written in what has been called the no-style style: that bland form straightforward linear prose that is storytelling stripped down to plot without digression, cinematic description without interesting lighting, and characterization more often based on type than idiosyncrasy (although "the eccentric best friend" is such a cliché that it's become a literary trope on its own). Even when mainstream literally fiction is written in a more poetic style, rather than the no-style style it is identifiable by those other characteristics.

Here's another salvo: The quality of writing and storytelling, overall, is often much better in "genre fiction," story per story, than is the case in literary "realistic" fiction. One may place numerous examples side by side and, barring personal taste regarding what you find exciting to read, just on the quality of writing alone many examples of genre novels are better-written than many in the mainstream. Writing that has substance as well as style. There is contemporary science fiction writing that is far more original in terms of style and narrative experiment than anything on the literary best-seller list.

Ignoring for the moment that "realism" in the novel is itself a construct, itself contested as a construct, itself subject to fashions of style and trends of subject matter: in fact the conventions of the Romantic/Victorian "realistic" novel were exactly what such writers as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and even E.M. Forster rebelled against. That was at the root of the Modernist literary rebellion, after all. When Woolf used interior monologue and stream-of-consciousness in her fiction, it is precisely a reaction against the stifling mannerisms of the staid literary novel. As much as I think Willa Cather did in fact write one or two examples of the Great American Novel (I would nominate some of Stephen King's less supernatural fiction as well); as much as I agree that Jane Austen, Henry James, and Edith Wharton were great stylists who brought to life characters that we all still care about; as much as I agree that Victor Hugo was a great, great writer of fiction which he intended to be realistic in its depiction of natural and psychological life, real dialogue, and characters true in motivation to the psychology of real people: as much as all of that is true, once you've absorbed the literary innovations of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and, yes, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Samuel Beckett, you can't go back. You can't stuff those horses back in their barns.

What most critics of the contemporary literary novel do is pay lip-service to the artistic greatness of those older Moderns, while in practice rolling back every new idea they brought to the writer's table. The literary novel these days owes more to Henry James and Jane Austen, or Nathaniel Hawthorne, than any other writers. Even writers such as Mark Twain are considered to be genre writers, and not taken seriously as Authors; which is proven by the typical reverence paid to Huckleberry Finn as one of the Great American Novels, but looking askance at most of the rest of Twain's explorations, such as Letters from the Earth.

In response to critics who like to dismiss this literary-critical dispute as having been settled long ago, I retort that obviously it's not, else the Critics of the Literary Novel wouldn't feel a need to keep setting up straw men to knock down, on the on the topic genre quality. Those self-anointed Critics who would present themselves as the gatekeepers of literary merit and literary taste are fond of building canons, of lists of Great Books, and debating what works should be included in The Canon, and which should be rejected. Meanwhile the average voracious reader just keeps reading whatever they can get their hands on; as always.

Literature remains an artifice. It is art, but it is also artifice. It is made by artists, but also by artisans. It is a made thing, like a sculpture, a painting, a beautiful building. (Music and dance are a bit different, as artforms, because they also involve time. Duration is part of their performance, and they must be performed.) Literature is neither inherently natural or realistic: "naturalism" is itself artifice.

Some of the rise of no-style no-genre fiction can be blamed, and has been, on the increasing professionalization of literature: the authors and critics who make their living by working in academia, or in hosting and teaching writer's workshops, make up a de facto professional class. Writers exist outside the professional-writer mainstream, of course. And it can be argued that writing styles, genres, and indeed approach, stretch across all other boundaries between writers. But professionalism does have an influence on writing style. Robert Bly lamented as early as the 1970s that writer's workshops (which even he taught; you gotta pay the bills) had generated a stylistic (no-style?) sameness among so many poets, in terms of both approach and content. How many MFA programs in writing are there now? Several hundred, scattered around the nation and world? Lots of people write; more than ever. That's only a bad thing if there are more imitators of the sameness than not.

As to the quality of genre fiction writing, I find writers like Gregory Benford, a physicist who writes "hard science fiction," i.e. SF based on speculative science from astrophysics to biology, to be stylists of a high order. Sometimes it's as though the writing style is part of the experience, which style at its best ought to be, enhancing the reading by getting you deeper into the ideas organically. Not telling you about the ideas, but embodying them. Other hard SF writers who have stylistic chops include Kate Wilhelm, Greg Bear, Samuel R. Delany, Roger Zelazny, Ursula K. LeGuin, and several others I could name. The point here is that SF is not just about the ideas, it's about exploring the ideas in a literary way, with prose that involves the reader. The language envelops and immerses one rather than just being a tale told. On the fantasy side of the speculative fiction genre, great stylists include Patricia Mckillop, Neil Gaiman, and of course J.R.R. Tolkien, whose works helped establish the modern genre.

I would add Charles Williams, a friend of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, one of The Inklings, whose "spiritual fantasy" novel are amazing works of fantastic fiction. In Descent Into Hell, one of his characters is gradually losing his mind in a kind of spiritual/psychological damnation, and the way Williams describes his inner world is compelling and frightening. His novel All Hallow's Eve is a masterpiece, beginning when the protagonist and hero of the novel has just died, and finds herself in an astral version of her beloved city. Throughout this novel, Williams' prose is amazing, perfectly tuned to the emotional pitch of the characters yet original and strange.

I could go with several examples. Suffice to say, one of the reasons I read speculative fiction is because it is a literature of ideas, yet if those ideas were told in the no-style style, they would be dry and boring indeed. The storytelling matters greatly.

I have few grand conclusions to offer, and I know the salvos I have shot across the bows of mainstream literary criticism will be greeted equally with derision and agreement. I do believe it's more than just a matter of taste and preference, though. I believe that it matters how you tell a story. And I further believe that the manner of the telling should reflect what is being told. That is the whole point of literary style, it seems to me.

Writing: On Not Being Able to Fit Into the Boxes

I have difficulty even seeing, much less respecting and obeying, what some writers and editors feel are hard-and-fast lines between poetry, prose, nonfiction, creative writing, and essay. To me those all blend together. The most interesting books I read tend to be like the Japanese ideal of zuihitsu, "following the brush," the great exemplars of which style are Essays In Idleness and The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. The American writers who have given us journal-books that move easily between prose, poetry, poetic prose, prose-poetry, and creative nonfiction essay, are who really stay with me. Andrew Schimmel, Gary Snyder, Paul Blackburn's The Journals, which I have only recently discovered, to my great delight.

I love the form of haibun, which is the form Basho's travel journal books are written, with alternating prose and haiku sections, on some pages just a single poem, on other pages a formal haibun which is a prose description of a moment or subject followed by a haiku on the same moment or subject but from yet a different direction. In not irrelevant ways, the haibun is my ideal form for writing.

I see when literary publishers offer open reading periods, during which anyone can submit a manuscript or collection, that they often create fixed categories for acceptance. You have to submit through the Poetry gate, or the Fiction gate, or the Nonfiction gate. But what if your manuscript moves between all of these? What if there is no real distinction, or boundary between them, in your writings? Where do submit them? I often feel a kind of decision paralysis in the face of such categorical requirements, and end up not submitting anything anywhere. Because inevitably I'll place my manuscript in the wrong box, and be automatically rejected.

The fact is, my best writing is All-of-the-above. The writing of mine that I like best, perhaps I should more truthfully say. The stuff that I write that excites me doesn't live within the boxes of Prose or Poetry, but tend to be Prose-AND-Poetry. I readily grant that there are lots of editors who just don't know what to do with that. I'm sure I've caused more than one headache which led to rejection. (There is also the issue that when you read a certain genre, yo bring presuppositions—one hesitates to say prejudices—to one's reading, and things that don't go along the usual trails get rejected not because they're bad but because they are not comprehended.)

Well, I don't want to make editors' jobs harder, and I'm not trying to be difficult, AND it seems to me that the rigid categories between writing genres are in fact a barrier rather than an aide. They are illusory, and often arbitrary, and even occasionally rather dismissive.

Because the one genre I don't really write in, and have no real "feel" for writing in the genre that doesn't like to be called a genre, namely, mainstream literary linear-narrative prose fiction. I have written in that non-genre-genre, an have even been published in it. It is just that it seems like an artificial construct to me, like nothing real at all. Virginia Woolf was right: life is not lived as a neatly-arranged linear prose narrative, as consciousness is both more diffuse and more Brownian (nay, distractible) than the artificial construct of linear narrative pretends it is. And not just Woolf says this, but Albert Einstein, whose spacetime theories strongly imply that everything is always happening all at once, and time itself is a constructed fiction of consciousness that we make up to be able to cope with time.

It's very likely that I will only rarely ever get published. (And thank you ever so much to those sympathetic editors who have been willing to take risks on my behalf!) I just can't seem to stay in the boxes.

The Re-Enchantment of Art 5: Instruments of Revelation

(Some random notes and quotes from recent travels and readings.)

At Carlsbad Caverns National Monument, there are a couple of small art galleries in the visitor center devoted to art inspired by the caverns. One of these rooms contains nothing but photographs by Ansel Adams. Adams didn't think his cave images, made for a large project of photos of all the national parks, were very successful: Adams always worked with natural light, and of course the caves had to be lit artificially for his photos.

On the wall of the Adams gallery at Carlsbad is the following quote:

Our time is short, and the future terrifyingly long. Believing as we must that things of the heart and mind are most enduring, this is the opportunity to apply art as a potent instrument of revelation, expression, and perpetuation of wilderness activities and moods. Through art of brush, pen, and lens, each one no less than the other, we possess a swift and sure means of touching the conscience and clearing the vision.
—Ansel Adams

Art as an instrument of revelation. Art as a means of touching the conscience and clearing the vision.

Art is kenotic. Art is prophetic. Art is revelation. Or at least, art can be all these things. It doesn't have to be, or need to be, yet it often is. Art as an instrument of revelation.

My own photographs often feel to me like splashes of cave paintings on the walls of rocks much older than time. I often feel as though all I am doing is waiting to see what is there, and what will happen next.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen . . .
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin.
—Bob Dylan

Stories in fiction and poetry are lies that can tell deeper truths. What passes for human interest on a daily basis is self-involved and deadening by comparison. Most self-involved fiction isn't revelatory, but deadening. What use is criticism if it doesn't likewise enliven the art that it discusses? What use is criticism at all, for that matter? Far better to go on making art than to talk about it. Of course, the old clichéd saying does hold truth to it: Those who can, do; those who can't, instruct.


Carlsbad Caverns; infrared photo

It has happened that we have been afflicted with a basic deprivation, to such an extent that we seem to be missing some vital organs, even as we try to survive somehow. Theology, science, philosophy, though they attempt to provide cures, are not very effective "In that dark world where the gods have lost their way." (Roethke) They are able at best to confirm that our affliction is not invented. . . . Abstract considerations will be of little help, even if they are intended to bring relief. Poetry is quite different. By its very nature it says: All those theories are untrue. Since poetry deals with the singular, not the general, it cannot—if it is good poetry—look at things of this earth other than as colorful, variegated, and exciting, and so, it cannot reduce life, with all its pain, horror, suffering, and ecstasy, to a unified tonality of boredom or complaint. By necessity poetry is therefore on the side of being and against nothingness.
—Czeslaw Milosz

Poetry deals with the singular. It can also deal with the universal, with the cosmic, with the fully human, but it gets there via the specific and singular. Poetry doesn't have to be didactic or hectoring to be true, or tell the truth. Sometimes the most prophetic poems are those that show us what is going on, that just present the truth as it is lived by real people.

Nothing that isn't beautiful can be true, only the true is lovable.
—Paul Cezanne

Cezanne was an extremist in many of his views, an uncompromising artist who made enemies by refusing to change his ways. But he was often right. There is a lot to his comment here, that whatever truth is, it is always beautiful. Or can be perceived as beautiful.

The simple truth is, those we try to explain away all mysteries fail utterly, simply because there are always larger mysteries that cannot be explained.

Art as an instrument of revelation: What we see that is beautiful contains truth that sometimes we don't want to confront. But we must.

Those End of the Year (Reading) Lists

Those bloody end-of-the-year lists. Top Ten lists of the "best" of everything. The annual ratings and beratings and appropriations and dismissals. Lists of good things, bad things, nothing special, personal lists masquerading as definitive critical statements. It's just the annual ritual to make lists. It's the thing people expect of you, expect of each other. It's what expected. It's one of those end-of-the-year rituals that people do without thinking about it overmuch. They just do it.

I'm not very big on just doing something because you've always done it. I'm not big on living life by rote, by habit, without thinking about it very much. I'm not big on not-thinking, on received wisdom that is accepted without being examined first. Ironically, of course, those people who most cling to their opinions as being their own are often those same people who don't really have any ideas of their own, but thrive instead on parroting received wisdom. "Everybody knows. . ." is the phrase that most often precedes a flurry of thoughtless, unexamined opinions.

Most lists are pointless. It's not even that they're predictable, dull, and always the same sort of thing as they were last year. It's that they change nothing. The world doesn't ripple with their passing. So lists, especially Top Ten lists, don't seem very useful. Nothing changes: mostly the status quo is affirmed. (I'm not alone in this opinion.)

Far more interesting are lists of things people have accomplished during the past year, including such lists as Stephen Mills' list of what books he read. That's an appealing idea. It's actually the only idea for an annual list that appeals to me right now.

Yet when I thought of compiling a list of what I've read in 2011, to be honest I was daunted, as it's a huge list. People who know me know that I'm a voracious reader, usually reading more than three books at any given time; I read quickly, and retain most of it. I actually couldn't give you a complete list of what books I read in 2011, because I didn't count or keep track; and to be honest, a couple of months are blurry in my mind, following the surgery at the end of June, when the anaesthesia was still fogging my memory and cognition pretty badly. At the same time, when I was first recovering from the surgery, I wasn't very mobile, and sat around reading a lot for a few weeks. In fact, I had laid in lots of unread books on my sun-porch table, to read as I was moved while recovering. I got through some of those, but not all of them. Well, there's another surgery to get through in the coming year, so it's good to stack on hand for then, as well.

And then there's the long list of books I've re-read, read again, read for the umpteenth time—because as unfashionable as it is in many critical circles I do read for pleasure as well as for edification; so I come back to re-read some books every so often. Every couple of years or so, I re-read two or three of Raymond Chandler's novels. This past year also includes a lot of Virginia Woolf, especially To the Lighthouse, which I've been thinking about a lot this year, as a work of fiction that tells much truth about what it is to be an artist and a person.

I also re-read, as I usually do, some favorite novels in the science fiction and fantasy genres—as problematic as I find the whole literary-critical situation around "genre," especially in the way mainstream "fine art literary fiction" tradition tends to look down its nose at SF, claiming literary quality for itself and denying it to "genre" fiction, which is bloody nonsense—including a couple of SF series by C.J. Cherryh and Chris Claremont. I also read a series new to me, by Jack McDevitt. And some other SF classics that I hadn't actually had the chance to read before, like Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

Notable reading this year in poetry has been getting further into Kenneth Rexroth, re-reading Jim Harrison's Letters to Yesenin and In Search of Small Gods, and a few other things. I've found a number of small books by poets I hadn't heard before which I quite enjoyed, for example, Elizabeth Dodd's Archetypal Light and Brendan Galvin's Whirl Is King. There's been more, both critical reading and pleasure reading of actual poetry, as heretical as that seems to be in some quarters nowadays, a list too long to detail without having to spend an hour compiling it. I did re-read a poetry classic, Love Alone by Paul Monette.

I read a lot of non-fiction. I get a lot out of good creative nonfiction writing, on the level of John McPhee and Barry Lopez. This year I read a couple of Michael Pollan's books on botany and our human interaction with it. I re-read some Henry Petroski, who is one of my favorite creative nonfiction writers, taking delight in the things that people make and unmake. One of my favorite reads this year was Annie Proulx' Bird Cloud, her memoir about her home in rural Wyoming, which she built on land full of wildlife and beauty. I enjoy reading writer's books on writing, both memoirs of life and of writing; it's not that writers make better or more self-aware critics of writing, but when they speak as artists talking about art, it often leads to insights about creativity itself.

There's more, of course, but I'll stop there. Needless to say, reading is a continuous activity in these parts. I don't apologize, though, for being well-read. It adds a lot of layers to living. And makes life more interesting.

Folk Music: Against the Hit Parade

Pete Seeger wrote the following in 1956. It was true then, and it's still true today. Possibly even more true now than it was then, because the technology by which music is made, distributed, shared, and listened to has kept evolving, and changing at a rapid rate. The record companies have now lost their bootheel-n-the-throat control of music production and distribution, which is the good side of the current technological miracle; the bad side is of course that those same record companies, in their flailing about to try to maintain their dissolving monopoly, have become vicious about trying to keep that monopoly, while at the same time producing an endless stream of newly-hatched, overly-produced, hype-marketed, vapid, cheap and tawdry, hollow, talentless pop stars (is Lady Gaga, the latest incarnation of Madonna and/or Marilyn Manson, a postmodern commentary on this trend or herself part of it, or both?)—most of whom have been influenced by Pete Seeger without probably ever hearing his name. Seeger's influence on folk and pop music remains incredibly strong, and his opinions, even his older ones, are still worth listening to:

I am against the Hit Parade because I am against anything that would make a sheep out of a human being. The world is too big, and its people too varied, to try and make one hit parade suit us all. True, the gods of mass production may proclaim that it is much cheaper, much more efficient, to produce everyone's music at one place and at one time. But which would you rather hear—cheap music or good music? (And by good you might mean anything from Calypso to blues to Bach.)

Not only every country, but every region and town, every national group, every age group, every industry, even every school or summer camp should have its own hit parade, refusing to follow slavishly the dictates of Hollywood and New York.

Fortunately, at the same time that TV has concentrated the entertainment business as never before, LPs [and now CDs and MP3s] have enabled hundreds of minority idioms to receive hearings. The so-called Hit Parade is, today, simply the most popular songs of the fourteen-to-eighteen age group, and is supported by them and a few saloon goers who help feed the jukeboxes. There have been many songs which have attained Number One on the Hit Parade, yet 75 percent of the population have never heard of them.

Another way to think about this is a parallel slogan from artist/shaman/astrologer/writer Rob Brezsny, who says: Performance is life. Entertainment is death. Entertainment, which is what the music industry tries to reduce music to, both to sanitize it and make it harmless and control it, and also to try to own it financially, is passive; entertainment is you not making your own art, but only taking in the art made for you by others. Produced for you by artists and musicians and writers who the arts industry has laughingly begun to call "content providers." As if the purpose of making art was only to sell it, to provide content to be sold. Thus goes the final decadent stages of the commercialization of creativity under what another contemporary radical philosopher has called Too-Late Capitalism.

Entertainment is ultimately deadening because it is passive. You are expected to be a passive consumer sucking at the teat of a centralized delivery system. (That's the paradigm that the five big worldwide music industry conglomerates are so desperately trying to hold onto.) Performance, by contrast, is enlivening because you do it yourself. You pull out the banjo, or the piano, or you go to choir rehearsal, and you make acoustic live music with other mostly-untrained people who are making music for their lives, their souls, and their health. (Which of course is one definition of "folk music" that Pete Seeger would agree with.) Performance is active, it's do-it-yourself, it's wild and anarchic and often very rough around the edges: folk music, in a word, which is music made by regular folk. Entertainment is very slick and over-produced, and slides down the gullet like teflon-coated candy. Performance, on the other hand, is often full of little rough edges and errors, those details that make it come alive. Put another way, performance exists where people who make music (or art) understand: Don't let the perfect get in the way of the good. Slick, perfectly-recorded, perfectly-packaged entertainment is deadening. Rough-edged folk music makes your heart beat as well as your feet.

Think about it. This is all tied into what Pete Seeger was talking about 50 years ago now.

(Hat tip to Swanee, who sent me a copy of Pete Seeger's The Incompleat Folksinger, ed. by Jo Metcalf Schwartz.)

The Tissue of Experience

The poem has to be saturated with impulse and that means getting down to the very tissue of experience. How can this element be absent from poetry without thinning out the poem? That is certainly one of the problems when making a poem is thought to be a rational production. The dominance of reason, as in eighteenth-century poetry, diminished the power of poetry. Reason certainly has its place, but it cannot be dominant. Feeling is far more important in the making of the poem. And the language itself has to be a sensuous instrument; it cannot be a completely rational one. In rhythm and sound, for example, language has the capacity to transcend reason; it’s all like erotic play.
—Stanley Kunitz, poet

How indeed can experience and feeling be absent from poetry without thinning out the poem? But that's exactly what we're told to do, these days, in this late-stage postmodern mannerist period in PoetryWorld. Anyone who objects to this trend, with the exception of elder statesman such as Kunitz, gets laughed out of the tangled labyrinths of academic poetry and criticism. Sincerity and meaning are forbidden as unfashionable. The current fashion is precisely what Kunitz above says does not work. And don't forget the required dash of irony.

I enjoy Kunitz' final note about transcending reason and erotic play: that's the real poetry. When poetry stays all in the mind, when it's about nothing but reason, when there's no eros in it, it fails. Poems written only from the head ultimately fail.

Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.
—Jacques Maritain, philosopher

The French philosopher and writer agrees. Bloodless poetry, overly rational poetry, is incomplete. A poem that hasn't been bled on, at least a little, is not a whole experience. How can we expect poets to be able to change the world in any way when we also expect them to be passive, intellectual, and bloodless? There is no equation that adds up.

It is quite evident that a barrier must be cleared in order to escape the psychologists and enter into a realm which is not "auto-observant," where we ourselves no longer divide ourselves into observers and observed. Then the dreamer is completely dissolved (fondu) in his reverie. His reverie is his silent life. It is that silent peace which the poet wants to convey to us.
—Gaston Bachelard, philosopher, The Poetics of Reverie

Another French philosopher and writer. The Poetics of Reverie was a book I first read decades ago, when I barely had enough life-experience to understand it. But Bachelard was discussing the connection between dreaming, the Dreamtime, and creativity, which I already knew was there. He was articulating something I already knew to be true. So I pursued reading the book, even though it had little clarity for me till some years later. that silent peace is something I have always known, often wordless, always immersive, the very essence of what Kunitz calls the tissue of experience. That silence upon which all words are founded, which they all arise from and all fall back into, that silence is the very fabric of existence.

An artist says, "I started being an artist when I was five years old." Well, so what? So did everybody. At that age, everyone's an artist. What makes you an artist is that you keep making art when everyone else stops being an artist. You keep going, while they don't.
—Vic Muniz, artist, in an interview

I did stop making art, for awhile, earlier in life. I didn't stop being creative, as I was still writing and making music, but i did stop making visual art. Then I started again. Photography is and always has been the core of that. I started making mature, decent photographs, when I traveled overseas, specifically in Indonesia. Each time I travel, still, I get better as a photographer. Photography and Photoshop was and still is the artistic tool, my palette knife as it were, that got me going, that liberated me technically, that allowed me to make the images I was seeing in my head but didn't have the manual skills to draw or paint.

There's no separation anymore. On the world's most difficult day, I can still make something, eventually. I might fight against it all day long, exhausted and spent by other things, and finally at the end of the day, with the last ounce of strength, then it's done. Tonight the moon was riding above white cumulus clouds; now it's hovering, half-size, above the backyard pines. How do you fight the tendency for art to crystallize and turn solid, and loose its fluid life?

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.
—Allen Ginsberg, poet

Ignore the party line. I don't think poetry is only self-expression, and neither did Ginsberg. But he did think it could be used to express parts of the self the tribe would perhaps rather we didn't express. Poetry is transgressive, not tame. Poetry that is tamed, as Kunitz says, is reasonable, rational, powerless. Ginsberg at his best was all about re-empowering poetry: not the poet, but Poetry. The rational poets would criticize Ginsberg and his ilk as being too self-indulgent, too ecstatic, too unpredictable, too vulgar—by which they meant that he was not to be tamed, and he did not toe the party line. There are several party lines these days in Poetryworld, but most of them are inherently tame, and aren't going to break free of anything, or into anything.

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual—when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions—it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.
—Isaac Bashevis Singer, novelist and storyteller

This is Singer agreeing with Kunitz, though it's likely they never heard these sentiments directly from each other. Great minds think alike, come to the same conclusions, and say some similar things. Singer acknowledges the tension between the Apollonian and Dionysian, the left and right sides of the brain (mind, really, but let's use the conceptual cliché for the moment nonetheless), and expresses that tension as a conflict. But like Kunitz, Singer also implies that it's in the union of emotion and intellect, of passion and craft, that real art comes into being. So much contemporary poetry lacks substance precisely to the extent that it stays in the intellect and ignores the passions, that it is not poetry of the soma, of the whole body. Other poetries, unfettered and cloven-hoofed, march across the dreamscape and send shivers up the playground. Those are the poetries I feel aligned to, allied with, attuned to. Images and sounds and movements that rise irrationally from those parts of the self neither intellectual nor rational.

The imagination is not an escape, but a return to the richness of our true selves; a return to reality.
—George Mackay Brown, poet

Architecture unfetters us as well. A beautiful building breathes with light and air, it brings us into the space it defines as a living thing. The deliberate geometry of a pure space opens the heart as well as the mind. Years ago, when I was studying modern dance, we went out as a class from the mirrored classroom to the open courtyard of a modern building on campus, and danced there. Passersby stared, most not stopping. There was no music, other than the sounds of hands and feet slapping the concrete of floor and walls, the wind, the distant traffic sounds. But I was filled with sound, just filled with it. As we continued, for several silent connected minutes, a few walkers did stop to watch and become part of the landscape. And then we were done, the late afternoon sun was warm, and we went back, aglow with the pleasure of the dance. It was a moment when we lived the saying "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture;" having done the latter, I feel just fine when doing the former.

So, the tissue of experience made into art, poetry, music, dance, is all of these. It is one seamless fabric, not a series of separate, discrete, rational little envelopes. We are all of a piece, all one fabric, one force.

Oh God, save me from being profound! Save me from those who are carefully literary!
—James Broughton, poet, filmmaker, all around wizard

Benjamin Britten: An Appreciation

There was a period in my life as a composition student when I studied the music of Benjamin Britten intensively, not least because of his eclectic approach to composition. He himself was open to influence from many sources, including ancient musics from his own English tradition, and also including musics he encountered in his travels around the world as a composer and conductor.

As some few examples of his wide-ranging and eclectic style: Britten wrote a powerful setting of "The ugly Duckling" for boy soprano and piano; he wrote a chamber opera for liturgical performance, "Curlew River," based on the Japanese Noh drama "Sumidagawa," he wrote his important operas, of course, the best of them based on literary masterpieces of the 19th C.; and the sublime "War Requiem," which incorporates poems by Wilfred Owen, is a masterpiece of 20th C. artistry in response to the pity of war.

And I was attracted to Britten because, like me, he was a gay composer. His life-long partner, tenor Peter Pears, was often the important voice in many of his greatest works, including the "War Requiem" and the operas. Pears was both lover and muse to Britten, and many works were written specifically for him to premiere.

I have performed on more than one occasion his famous Yuletide work "A Ceremony of Carols," for chorus and harp. I first performed that work in high school, and several times since. It was one of a few works I encountered at the end of high school and beginning of college that led me towards an in-depth study of Medieval music; especially medieval English carols, which I made a special study of while in music school. I cheerfully thank Britten for being one of the composers who pointed me towards Medieval music, therefore, which has been very important to my musical life, and remains so to this day.

I'm certain Britten has influenced me directly, at least on some subconscious level, as a composer. There are a few 20th C. composers—Britten, Lou Harrison, Alan Hovhaness, etc.—whose works I have performed and studied, who all had the gift of writing amazing, memorable melodies. I know that's been an influence on me.

As a composer, I often focus more on melody, and interwoven contrapuntal and heterophonic melodies, than I do on harmony or tonality. Melody, whether it's song or instrumental, is the core of the music i write. In analyzing my own musical habits, several years ago, I realized that melody is at the heart of everything I do as a composer; sometimes it's tangled up, sometimes it's quite dissonant, but it remains central to what I hear and what I write.

I have a permanent soundtrack in the back of my mind, which is always playing something, or making up something. Melody is at the core of what I hear with my inner voice, that permanent soundtrack, which I dip into, which I listen to, when I am writing music. I recognize certain patterns that evoke a particular feeling or nuance for me, that are melodic, sometimes based within a complex chord, sometimes very simple.

I can recognize some aspects of the musical context around the melodies I write—the modal forms, the complex chords, the occasionally dissonant backdrops—as having been influenced by Britten, as well as by Messiaen, Harrison, Takemitsu, and some others. The patterns and structures are not imitative, not obvious in any way, beyond the "flavor" or "feel" of the music. I do tend to write modally rather than tonally, as most of these influences on me also did.

Here then are three quotes from Benjamin Britten, the great 20th C. British composer:

•

There should be no such profession as criticism. Musicologists, of course, are quite different, and this is a sadly neglected profession in this country—but there should definitely be no regular critics. To go through life living off other people's work clearly has too degrading an effect.
—Benjamin Britten, essay "Variations on a Critical Theme"

I like here the distinction he makes between musicology, which is the study and appreciation of music, and criticism. Musicology, which I minored in, in music school, is the study of music, its history and forms, its aesthetic and artistic response to life, and so forth. In graduate school, I majored in ethnomusicology, which is the anthropological, ethnographic, and fieldwork-based study of the music cultures of foreign cultures from all around the world. (Ethno also includes the study of our own music culture, but from an anthropological and social perspective.) Music criticism is best done as narrative reporting, a description of a concert or other performance. Music criticism at its worst is ideological, prescriptive, and tends to dictate aesthetics rather than respond as an enthusiastic reviewer.

Or, as Duke Ellington said, in a similar context: Critics have their purposes, and they're supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what they really did.

•

Music demands more from a listener than simply the possession of a tape-machine or a transistor radio. It demands some preparation, some effort, a journey to a special place, saving up for a ticket, some homework on the programme perhaps, some clarification of the ears and sharpening of the instincts. It demands as much effort on the listener's part as the other two corners of the triangle, this holy triangle of composer, performer and listener.
—Benjamin Britten, (speech) On Receiving the First Aspen Award

Britten is speaking here of the necessity for active listening, as opposed to passive entertainment. I agree strongly with this. The listener needs to be not only intellectually, but viscerally engaged with music. Music is not an intellectual art, it engages the feelings directly—and it can do so without even engaging the verbal, rational mind, but can bypass it entirely.

I have had occasion to argue with poets who had the opinion the poetry was the greatest (most rarified, highest) artform, because language is so abstract; but music is even more abstract, not even requiring language (symbolic or otherwise) to be able to create a powerfully moving aesthetic experience.

Britten, like other composers I have admired, was a composer who knew the power of words-and-music, how the two together can synergize into something greater than just each part alone. His choral and solo vocal writing is sublime, some of the most pleasing to sing as a performer, and even at its most complex it retains a sense of being rooted in primal human song, the communal activity of singing together, in a way that makes us into one voice. We achieve unity through song, through making art together. And this is an aspect of English choral music that is well-known, in its applications of social cohesiveness, and also of singing together in church, making us all spiritually one through the medium of unitary song.

•

All of us—the public, critics, and composers themselves—spend far too much time worrying about whether a work is a shattering masterpiece. Let us not be so self-conscious. Maybe in thirty years' time very few works that are well known today will still be played, but does that matter so much? Surely out of the works that are written some good will come, even if it is not now; and these will lead on to people who are better than ourselves.
—Benjamin Britten, interviewed by Edmund Tracey (Sadler's Wells Magazine, Autumn 1966)

This speaks directly to me as an artist and composer. Indeed, "Let us not be so self-conscious." That actually inhibits creativity, that kind of self-consciousness about always needing to create an original masterpiece. I can think of at least two composers I knew in music school who crippled themselves creatively by being too perfectionistic, too concerned about originality, too worried about the end result—to the point where they basically stopped writing music. This kind of perfectionism in art can thus be crippling to the artist.

Britten's attitude, by contrast, is more relaxed. He was a working composer all his life–and in some ways his attitudes towards his work were craftsmanlike, very artisanal. Not that he didn't always give his best, as a good craftsman ought; rather, he did his best work, then moved on to the next project. There were no endless rewrites and reworkings, the sort of compulsive editing that can take an actual masterpiece and destroy it. To make a masterpiece, you have to be able at some point to just stop, and declare the work done. There may well still be imperfections, things you would fix, or do differently. But the attitude Britten had, which could serve as a good role-model for any artist, was to look forward to fixing his mistakes in the next work. He did revise his work, but not neurotically. Often it takes a new occasion, some time after the original work's conception, that gives one the chance to fix things; and also the time to gain a clearer perspective on what might need to be fixed, and what can stand already as good enough.

Poems Published Previously, or Not

I have spent a fair bit of time doing computer file management, these past weeks, as I am mostly housebound while I recover from surgery. It's a good opportunity to do some organizing.

I have compiled a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet of all (I think) the poems I've published in print and online journals since 2001. The number of poems published, including several individual haiku, is over 50. And that's from not even trying very hard to get published. I found the number a little surprising, as I don't send out many poems to many journals very often. I have done some submissions in cyclic spurts of activity, when it interested me and I could sustain the work involved. But then I go through long periods where keeping up with the follow-ups is more than I can cope with. Well, maybe that will change, now that I will have back the energy previously stolen from me by my now-removed chronic illness.

And I've just had a couple more short poems published. This time I was asked if the poems could be reprinted, from where they had previously appeared, on this blog. It's always nice to be asked.

The concept of publishing and reprinting interests me in the wake of being asked for a couple of poems. What interests me, just now, is the assumptions behind the definitions of "publishing" and "reprinting." Essentially, these two poems were ones I posted on this blog; they were found by an editor, who asked me if they could be published in an online poetry anthology: essentially, if they could be reprinted. (Of course I said yes: it's a lovely online journal, the editor is an utterly charming individual, and my little poems will be keeping company with poems by other writers who I greatly respect.)

I've written considerably more than 50 poems since 2001. I've written, not counting haiku, at least 50 poems annually each year since 2001. I don't count or track or catalog the poems I've written beyond gathering them into an annual Microsoft Word file. Some years yield more finished poems than others; some poems are parts of extended series that might take years to compile, while others are stand-alone solitons. I don't spend a lot of time cataloging my work, as that is an effort I'm not very interested in; besides, I've always been ridiculously prolific, as a writer, visual artist, and musician. I stopped counting finished pieces years ago. Even in my youth, I thought it pretentious and egotistical to apply Opus numbers to my musical compositions; so why would I want to do something similar for my poems?

I haven't been writing many poems this past year—but then, I've been focused on writing lyrics for the new music commission, so that takes up that slack. If you count original lyrics for the new music as individual poems, add another dozen or so to this year's totals. And while I am writing lyrics, which is an entirely different kettle of fish than writing "pure" poetry, I do attempt to make these lyrics as poetic as possible, as much like good poems as I am able. They will be sung by chorus, or soloists and chorus, but that doesn't mean I will slack off from my desire to write the best words I am able, to function as part of the synergistic whole that is the words-and-music of a good song.

I do submit poems from time to time. It tends to be a cyclic activity: something I give a lot of attention to, when some journal or request for submissions ignites my interest, followed by cycles of disinterest.

There are a few poetry contests and journals I am thinking of submitting my work to at this time. I've sent off a couple of query letters this week. (Another advantage of being stuck at home post-surgery: I have time to write inquiries.) Some of these submissions are pretty straightforward. But one or two potential submissions have stumbled over the shibboleth of asking for poems that have never been published before, anywhere, at any time.

I still find it odd that a contemporary poetry journal would insist on this exceptionalism—an exceptionalism that masquerades as a request for originality. There is so much rhetoric flying about, in the postmodern Poetry World, about how originality doesn't matter any more, how "new" works can be made by recombining existing or found texts, and so forth. In other words, we live in a culture that has come to accept artistic sampling. (The ethics of sampling, versus pure originality, are rarely addressed, however.) So when an editor asks for something new, the assumptions behind the definitions of "new" and "original" become problematic.

I find it odd that a poetry journal editor would consider a poem I wrote and posted on my blog, or website, as "previously published." Not that anyone actually reads anything I post online—but the idea that posting a poem on this blog makes it unpublishable elsewhere seems rather parochial, especially in this current climate of artistic recombinant sapling.

Is the world so small that we need fight so fiercely against the corruption of unoriginality?

I know it might somewhat unfair to frame the issue this way. I know that one legitimate reason to ask for previously unpublished work is that it's easier for editors to deal with previously-unseen poems than to have to go through the permissions and copyright issues that can crop up. It just takes less effort to promote new work, in some cases, than it does to secure reprint rights and privileges.

But the assumptions behind the definitions of "new" and "original" and "previously unpublished" are not perhaps so clear-cut that they can be simply ignored. When I write and post a poem on this blog, few people will ever see it. If an editor would publish it elsewhere, chances are there would almost no overlap in audience. Logically, there doesn't seem to be any conflict. So why the bother about what poems are or are not "previously published"? It sometimes seems a bit extreme, this requirement to always be original and unique.

On the other hand, poems, even poems written by me, are not in short supply. There are always more. I cna always write a new poem, if I am inspired, to submit to a journal, on a topic that ignites my muses. So I don't need to spend any angst on the "previously published" issue. I can just write something new.

The question is, however: Should I be required to?

Robert Archambeau has an insight or two regarding poetry's popularity that I feel is correlated to this idea that poetry needs to be not-already-published in order to be published. (Stating it that way seems like a tautology; but that only points out how absurd this situation can become.) Mr. Archambeau concludes an interesting discussion of the generation of Russian poets that included Andrei Voznesensky, poets who were able to fill sports stadiums for their poetry readings, with the following comments:

. . . I think about this when I hear people say, of one or another contemporary American poet, "he deserves more readers," or "she deserves an audience." I think about it, too, when I hear suggestions about how to get more people interested in poetry (by adding music to readings, by putting little placards with stanzas on them in the subway, etc.) These are supply-side solutions to a demand-side problem. They try to make something available, in hopes that this availability will create demand.

The problem is, the demand for poetry, previously unpublished or otherwise, from the general reading public, is at a record low. Many poets seem to get quite upset about this contemporary state of affairs. The lack of a broad poetry-reading public is taken as cause for despair, and often as a "problem" to be "fixed." Which is where Mr. Archambeau's analogy from (Reagan-era voodoo) economics comes into play.

I like the analogy regarding supply-side economics. It gets at the very root, perhaps, of why attempts to enlarge poetry's readership seem doomed to fail. (I also find it interesting that supply-side economics doesn't work any better in the financial market than it does in poetry, yet the supply-side approach is steadily maintained by ideologues with agendas.) Perhaps the "previously unpublished" attitude of editors who reject poems published so obscurely that there would be no overlap in readerships is a supply-side attitude. The problem is that increasing poetry's readership is a demand-side problem, as Mr. Archambeau says, and there is no possible supply-side solution. When an editor rejects a poem published on one's own website as "previously published," they are buying into the supply-side ideology. Well, they may not know that, or frame the issue that way; some might be offended to have their requirements expressed in these terms. (One notices that it is very often possible to offend an editor's pride by questioning their publishing criteria. Perhaps this is yet one more example of how economic insecurity dominates arts publishing, how lack of an audience breeds poor self-esteem, which in turn breeds brittle egos.)

The issue is, as always: Does poetry matter? Or, if it does not matter, why not?

I am not convinced that it matters whether or not poetry matters. I am convinced, on the other hand, that making poems is wroth doing, whether or not the demand is there. I don't make poems to become popular, famous, or wealthy. I make poems because sometimes a poem is the best way to convey an experience, idea, or multiplex situation to another person. (Sometimes music or visual art are better ways to convey the same.) I make poems because that's often the best way, on a given day, for me to make art. Art is meant to connect with its audience: at its best, art connects with us on many levels, changes the way we see the world, and gives us an opportunity to open and expand our consciousness beyond its usual worn-in grooves.

Art is inherently not a supply-side commodity. Mostly, no one cares whether or not I make art. I care more than anyone else that I make art. (And I do make for more than one reason. Some days, recovering from chronic illness, surgery, or the dark night of the soul, it's the best way to cope with and overcome my immediate circumstances. Making art has more than once literally kept me alive and sane.) Supply-side thinking imagines that it is a problem to be solved that no one cares more than I do about me making art. Supply-side solutions are built on the assumption that an audience should care about the art I make. Further, that there ought to be an audience in the first place.

But there's no inherent requirement that my art have any audience. There's no natural law saying that people are supposed to care at all. That they should care about art, even a little bit. Arguments that use the word "should" invariably reduce to the opinion that you are supposed to care about my art as much as I do.

Well, I don't feel that way. I don't demand that an audience should care at all about my poems. It is very nice to be asked for a poem by an editor; and I usually say yes to such requests. It is very nice to hear that some artistic product that I made has been loved by someone—it's even more thrilling when I get feedback from someone that something artistic I produced made a difference in someone's life. I always appreciate hearing those stories—because I know I have a blind spot about how anything I do matters to anyone else in the world. My blind spot is that I usually I assume that nothing I do matters to anyone but me. That's neither angst nor loneliness, merely a recognition that I am only one small fish in a very large pond.

So, anyway, the next time I encounter a journal that requires "previously unpublished" work, I will make the choice, in that moment, of whether or not I want to spend the energy on submitting my work, or whether I will simply move on to other pastures. I do not despise any editor who requires that what I submit has never seen the light of day before—yet I still can't help but find that attitude a bit parochial, in this day and age. Publishing, self-publishing, print or online, has never been easier. It just seems like a waste of energy to require such purity tests regarding publishing, when so many no longer bother. It's a very big ocean, and it's full of fish. Requiring each little fish to come up with something never said before, ever, at any time, anywhere, just seems a bit severe.

So it's not that I would automatically refuse to submit to a journal that required work that is "previously unpublished." In truth, it's that my choice would be how much effort I wanted to expend to satisfy those requirements. I might choose to spend the effort needed to satisfy the requirement. Or I might not.

It's just too bad when an editorial requirement consistently closes doors that might deliciously be opened.

What's Your Favorite Novel?

I was having a discussion the other evening about what were out favorite novels. The truth is, I'm not sure I could pick just one. I'm not even sure it's a valid question.

One criterion for choosing one's favorite novel is: How many times have you re-read it? For example, every two or three years I get the urge to re-read Raymond Chandler; I think The Long Goodbye is a great novel, and I often re-read that one.

A contrasting criterion, however, is to choose a novel one reads, thinks very highly of, enjoyed the style and content and would recommend that others read, but one doesn't feel the need to re-read it often, if at all. For example, when I pick up Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, which I think is a great novel, I usually only re-read a favorite section or two, not the entire work, cover to cover. I thoroughly enjoyed James Joyce's Ulysses, but I don't feel the urge to re-read it very often.

How is one to choose a favorite novel, therefore? I'm not sure I can.

I could provide a long list of many novels I've enjoyed reading over the years. That list would contain as much science fiction as it would mainstream literary fiction (which is itself a genre, even though critics claim it is the non-genre by which they define, and usually dismiss, other forms of "genre fiction"). The list would also contain books by a select group of mystery writers, from whom it would be hard to pick one best novel out of the overall oeuvre; for example, Raymond Chandler (again), Tony Hillerman, Dana Stabenow, Dashiell Hammett. The Maltese Falcon is a great novel, very well-written, that I re-read less often than Chandler.

I could compile a long list, therefore, but it would be impossible to pick one novel out as my favorite novel. There are too many favorites, almost all of equal regard. I don't think I could pick just one. And it would be a very long list, as I'm an avid lifelong reader, with an unschooled knack for reading relatively fast and retaining most of what I read. (I can still remember the smell of the paper, and the breeze coming in my bedroom window, and the color of the sky, from one day the summer I was thirteen and read my first Isaac Asimov novel.)

The urge to compile lists of "Best Novels" is an urge that is mostly useless. It's a fun game, but it's also a subjective one. Hardly any two readers, or literary critics, would agree on all choices.

I'm not even sure I could pick one favorite writer, and his or her works, as my favorite. Different writers give me different pleasures.

For example, I thoroughly enjoy reading Arthur C. Clarke novels such The Songs of Distant Earth for his dry wit, his scientific imagination coupled with a cool humor regarding human foibles. I enjoy reading Isaac Asimov because of his characters and ideas; he has been called an intellectual writer, but he has a knack for making the reader care about those ideas his characters are tied up with, in novels such as The Gods Themselves or stories like "Nightfall." Kate Wilhelm has summoned in me an atavistic terror, a fear for my survival, because she gets me so involved in her well-depicted characters and the threatening situations they find themselves in; I can still feel the gut-impact of her novella "The Gorgon Field" just by thinking about it. Thomas Merton activates in this reader a living, active contemplation of world, self, and spirit; I think about my place in the world, my purpose, even as Merton describes (or photographs) what has moved him to feel that same way. I periodically re-read Ernest Hemingway's "The Nick Adams Stories" because these compiled stores and fragments are some of his best, most compelling writing; I've often thought that Hemingway shined brightest in story rather than novel form; and the Nick Adams stories are semi-auotbiographical, many of them in northern Michigan, my home state as well as Hemingway's, and thus the stories carry a special resonance for me, right down to my experiences summering in the some of the very same locales. (I've also visited Hemingway's home in Key West, and have a feeling for his work set in those locales, as well.)

In providing examples, I'm already making a list. My reading tastes are all over the map. I go for good writing, I don't care what "genre" it falls into.

One of the typical arguments I have with mainstream iiterary critics is their stubborn insistence on dismissing "genre fiction" when in fact much of writing in genre fiction is as good or better than one finds in mainstream literary fiction (again, a literary genre even if it claims not to be)—which these days is often bland, tepid, self-involved, and contains a lot of characters it's hard to have any empathy with. One of the reasons I find certain famous living authors over-rated is that they haven't managed to make me give a damn about their characters, stories, or quality of writing. A good story, well-written, is what makes for a great novel; mere style alone cannot sustain interest very long. Nor can the writer's fame alone make me want to read their new novel, if I found their previous novels uninteresting. People tell me I'm supposed to like and revere Philip Roth and John Ashbery; try as I might, I never have been able to.

One sometimes comes to the conclusion that the mainstream literary fiction (genre) one is "supposed" to adore is all about self-involved, angst-ridden New England urban dwellers; none of that speaks to my life or interests, dwelling as I do in Midwestern heartlands that most New Englanders neither comprehend nor want to. (I still laugh when a friend in New Hampshire was astonished by the fact that, out here in the Middle West, one can drive all day long and still only cross one state border.) Those of us who live in the "flyover" zone, who often live in smaller towns, or more rurally, than the literary denizens of either urban coast, often seem to live in another universe entirely. Even those who live in our large Midwestern metropolises, such as Chicago, Detroit, or Denver, have a different attitude towards life than those in Los Angeles or the New England megaplex. For one thing, the sky is simply much bigger out here. Under that big sky, it's easier to contemplate the horizon. One sometimes wonders if the reason New York City is so self-involved is because there can only see themselves reflected in their shiny glass-and-steel buildings, and can't see enough sky.

This may also be an aspect of my long list of favorite novels, many of which are weighted heavily towards novels that broaden the mind, that stretch outwards into the sky, that have a sense of wonder that is expansive rather than narcissistic and claustrophobic. Many novels on my list of favorites are novels that opened my mind in new directions, that gave me insight into cultures I never encountered or understood before, that explored ideas and relationships beyond those merely human-centered and social. This accounts for the large number of novels of speculative fiction on my list. It also may account for what attracts me to certain writers, while there are others to whose works I am unable to connect at all. E.F. Forster famously prefaced his great novel Howard's End with two words: "Only connect." And not only is that the theme of his novel, it's a good rule for living: only connect. Those people, real or fictional, with whom we are able to connect, all give us something for living. And connecting needn't be limited only to people like ourselves. Another reason I feel little connection with much mainstream literary fiction these days is that it has become very parochial; frankly, in my experience, writers from New York City are a lot more tunnel-visioned and parochial than writers from rural South Dakota (Linda Hasslestrom) or Michigan (Jim Harrison, a genuinely cosmopolitan writer) or California (a long list indeed).

Some writers we read for their content, their subject matter. I enjoy reading John Muir's diaries of his solo treks in the Sierras. Robinson Jeffers appeals to me as much for his creation-centered observational poems as for his writing style presented as an alternative to hermetic (obscurantist) Modernism. Both Hemingway and Harrison appeal to me because we're all Michigan boys at heart, although their appeal spreads out in many other directions, as well.

So I can't tell you what my favorite novel is. I don't know myself. There are too many available choices, potential possibilities, a long list of favorites. I could compile a list, but perhaps I already have, at least in part, simply by giving examples here as I meandered across the terrain of this topic. I might someday try to make a list. Yet list-making itself is something of which I am skeptical, veering as it does so close to canon-making. Such lists ought to be appreciative, not prescriptive: unlike most critics with an axe to grind or an ideological agenda to pursue, I don't insist that every other reader like the same novels that I do, even for the same reasons. A list of favorites would be only my idiosyncratic list, even if others agreed with me on many choices.

"Only connect." We do our best. But I think it remains better to connect out of love and common humanity, as Forster intimates in his novel, rather than out of an aggressive will to impose our social standards upon each other. So make your own connections, and make your own list of favorite novels. If we connect, thereby, that's all to the good.

On Writing Prompts

Writing prompts are ideas that are meant to kick-start a writing exercise. For example: "Think about what you had for lunch three days ago. Write about that, or about the place where you ate." Prompts are jumping-off points. They serve to get the writing mind going, to start the creative process. They're very useful for writers who are stalled, if not stuck, who don't know what they want to do next. They're useful as exercises for beginners.

I have a mixed relationship with writing prompts. Occasionally they are very stimulating, and interesting to me. It can depend on the mood.

Writing prompts also can be problems to be solved. That can keep it a bit too intellectual, a bit too detached. Your writing response to a prompt, which is really just a thought-form, a word-image, can stay safely at the level of the five-finger exercise, the étude, the study.

I have decided that, overall, I don't like writing prompts. There are two reasons. First is that they are someone else's idea of what to write about. That rarely works well for me. Not that I'm opposed to suggestions, rather that if your mind is already going in one direction, it can be completely derailed by an abrupt change of direction, and thus it can actually defeat the purpose by blocking the creative impulse.

I'd rather go wandering and see what catches my attention, what in the world generates a response. When I do like a writing prompt, it's because it generated a response, as if on a wander. I do this in particular with what I call camera walks, which are wanders with camera in hand, which cane be a meditation in itself.

The second reason is that I find most writing prompts insipid and unchallenging. They're just not very exciting. They don't activate my creative impulse, usually. That's not meant to sound arrogant, although it probably does. The truth is, I've been at this writing and making art game for some years now, and at some point you stop wanting to repeat all the beginning-level creative exercises, which is what most such offerings are.

Of course, there's no real reason to get irritated by writing prompts, and there's nothing wrong with beginning-level writing tools. In fact, they're essential. And no one is forcing me to use them.

What actually irritates me is the seemingly permanent assumption that we as writers never grow past needing such tools. When you're at certain stages in your creative process, having the tools on hand to kick-start your creativity is excellent, necessary, wonderful, essential. But at some point you must become a self-starter. At least to a minimum extent. You can't rely on external kick-starts forever. If you can['t switch over to kick-starting your own self internally, then what have you ever learned? How can you expect to continue to grow as a writer and go on?

There's a certain lowest-common-denominator aspect to this. While it's true that there are always new beginning writers who need the tools, there is a silent assumption, often enough, that we never outgrow such tools. And that's a false assumption. If you assume you're never going to grow up, then of course you never will. If you cannot conceive of something, you're unlikely ever to fulfill it.

So while I acknowledge that writing prompts as a craft tool have a definite and useful place in one's writing life, I also acknowledge their limitations. There comes a point in a writer's progress where you have to fly alone, or not fly at all.

Process of Writing 11: the Push

This past week I went up to visit my close friend and fellow artist Alex in the Twin Cities for four days. He is moving to New Mexico, and this was my last chance to see him in person, hang out, go out to dinner, lie on the couch together, before he leaves. It was a good visit, albeit intense and a bit of a rush. I helped him haul a load to give to the thrift store, and a few other errands.

I was tired when I got home, as it's a six hour drive, and so I spent a couple of days recovering and resting. Today it's gloriously, summery hot, with bright sunlight. I've been out in the garden pulling weeds and trimming back some overgrowth. My tulips are done; there were intensely beautiful this year. The lilies are about to start, and other things are also starting to flower, and will flower all summer long. I've designed the garden so there is color from spring through autumn. I was tired and dizzy earlier today, but then I realized I hadn't eaten yet and I also have been taking an antihistamine that might contribute to the dizziness. So I got some gardening done, and made a good dinner, and went to the store and got more of the other brand of antihistamine that I use.

I noticed that where I planted a patch of wildflowers last year, some have already returned. You have to be careful not to pull wildflowers thinking they're just weeds. So you have to wait an extra week, sometimes, to be sure. Which I waited till this week to weed the garden. Today I noticed that I have a beautiful columbine flower blooming in the wildflower patch, and the alyssum "carpet of snow" flowers are already coming up and starting to bloom. The lilies are huge and ready to bud soon: everywhere I had one or two lilies last year, they've split, and I now have four or five. It's going to be a glorious, colorful summer in the garden. I've already made several good flower photos from my garden this year, and I anticipate a very good summer for making new images.

When I was in the Twin Cities, then home afterwards, resting, I got almost no writing done. I did a lot of thinking about the new music commission, but the only real writing I got done was in the truck, while driving. As usual, being on the road loosens things up. I finished off the lyrics for two songs that had been waiting to be finished. I also got clear ideas on a couple of other songs, and made some notes, which I'll get back to later.

Distractions.

Since yesterday, though, I have been working hard on one song, which finally came into focus this week, and it's almost done. All I have to do is fill in the gaps in the piano and choral parts, the overall shape and frame is already there. It's an angry piece. It's the dark side of being born and raised in the Heartlands, where the shadow side of the tribal message is to stay in the closet, "conform to the norm," and engage in repression and self-censorship.

I am pushing hard to get as much of this commission done as I can in the next two weeks. I have a long list of things I need to get done before the surgery, which is now only a month away. Getting a lot of the music done is my main goal, secondary only to the goal of getting ready for the medical journey I'm about to go through. I feel a bit scattered, with a long list of Things To Do. If I get a little bit done every day, though, I'll somehow muddle through.

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Somebody asked me recently how I write, and in thinking about it, I clarified the point that I don't write in a linear fashion. For example, for this commission, I don't write the first song start to finish, then the second song, etc. I write wherever I feel like writing. It's typical to work on up to three songs at the same time, for this commission project. It's typical to switch back and forth, and write all day on the one that most catches my interest that day. I will write a section first that might come near the end of a piece. Then other sections.

The process of finishing a piece in final score sometimes means copying it over one last time, and stitching all the pieces together into a coherent whole. Nobody ever seems to see the seams. Some part of me knows all the pieces, has an overview, even if I mostly focus on the sections at first. Usually the piece in the end is coherent and unified, as it should be.

Breaking it up keeps me fresh. I might jump around between three pieces, writing parts of all of them in one session. It's only when I'm really one a role, and a single piece has developed its own momentum that I find myself giving it all my attention. What catches my interest on any given day is what I work on. The rest will be there waiting when I get back to it.

I find this way of working congenial in part because it minimizes blocks, or moment of getting stuck. if you're stuck and don't know what to do about one section, go off an work on another part of the piece. Many times, the "problem" solves itself, and I suddenly see (it feels like being gifted) how the problem section is supposed to work, how it fits together, and I go back to it to finish.

Some artists find this method of working chaotic and unsystematic. It's not truly unsystematic, it's just a different species of system: nonlinear rather than linear. Some writers of fiction work this way, too.

The only artform is which I do seem to start at the beginning and work through to the end is poetry. But the poem itself might be nonlinear, jumping around as the lamp of consciousness and awareness jumps around. I do write poems from the first line through to the last line, most of the time. The nature of the word-based artform of making a poem seems to call for that. But the mind within the poem, the lamp of consciousness, may be quite nonlinear. I do get criticisms about doing this from the left-brain poets, those who think that writing is an act of will rather than of listening. But such criticisms mean less and less to me every year, as time goes by, and experience shows that my way of creative writing actually produces good results.

More than one linear-minded poet has told me that they cannot understand or approve of the way I write poems, but they cannot find any fault with the resulting poems. (A sideways compliment if ever there was one: that we can't find anything to complain about, even though we believe we should have found something. Such criticisms are to laughed away into the wastebasket they deserve.)

The bottom line in your own creative process is really very simple: If it works for you, if it produces the results you want, or better than those, there's nothing wrong with your method, no matter how eccentric it appears to others. The creative mind is often an unconventional and rule-breaking mind. More precisely, a rule-ignoring mind. It's not about "thinking outside the box," it's more like not even noticing that there was a box. "There's a box?" The most creative people I've met in my life have all been of this type: "There's a box?" it's good example to keep in mind on those occasions where you start to second-guess yourself, or doubt your own creative process. If you trust nothing else, trust your creative process.

Why I Don't Worry About Posting Poems

1. I can always make more.

The idea that poems, even good poems, are a scarce resource is absurd. As long as you can keep making new art, some of it will be good, and some of it will be worth sharing. The idea that creativity is a scarce and treasured resource appeals to the mentality of some who would jealousy guard everything they own to keep entropy from taking it all away. But that's lack-thinking, not abundance-thinking. It's the mindset of the finite, closed game, in which someone must win and someone else must lose, versus the open-ended mindset of the infinite game, which stays in play forever.

Mostly I wait for poems to happen. (Right now, not many poems are happening, as all those currents seem to be flowing into the well of lyrics needed for the new music commission I am writing.) But I have been known, when inspired, to write to a prompt, or to write specifically for submission within the parameters given by a poetry journal, or other periodical. And I've had some success with that approach. (Although I am tempted to place "success" in quotes purely because what poetry-critical culture views as success is what I almost never think about, especially in the act of writing.)

2. The idea that posting a poem on one's website (or other online venue like this) means that the poem can't be published elsewhere is ridiculous.

Those poetry journals that view posting poems on one's own website, or even on a poetry workshop/critique forum means the poem has been "previously published" and therefore ought to be rejected, is based on the idea that only originality is good and true and must be pursued. Of course, ever since the beginning of the Romantic period in Western art (the early 1800s, circa the lifetime of Goethe), and especially during the Mondernist avant-garde of a century ago, the archetype of Originality, as well as of the Hero-Artist, has been lauded and praised and raised on a pedestal of its own making.

While I am not interested in recombinant or sampler literature—sampler-based music is only as good as its drum samples (kudos to Clyde Stubblefield, the single most sampled and under-credited funk/jazz drummer ever), and sample-based literature such as flarf and Oulipo is only as good as what it is sampling—I think there's a balance to be found between "pure" originality (there is no such thing) and overtly sampling art. Postmodernism is all about the reaction against Romantic and Modernist originality: postmodernism is fundamentally recombinant, with all possible elements viewed as being picked from a level playing field, whether they were formally fine art, outsider art, or popular culture ephemera. Postmodernism views "originality" in quotations itself, viewing all historical influences and root-sources as equally recombinant. While postmodernism's critique of colonial imperialism and hegemonic cultural norms has a great deal of merit to it, the formation of a brave new world wherein everything is reduced to same lowest common denominator of indeterminate artistic merit is not the answer.

And as for original rights in publishing: What, you've never heard of poems being republished in anthologies? Why is it so hard to generalize from that towards publishing a "previously published" poem purely because it's good, and because you, as the editor, want to publish it? The idea that one's journal's prestige is based mostly on publishing original work really limits your options. it's a valid route, if you want to take it, but it's not the only route available.

3. Because I can always write more, part two: Even when I don't want to write a poem, sometimes I do.

The idea that I am consciously in control of what comes out of my creative impulse is based on the false assumption that art is made by the will, from the mind alone, or by a finely-tuned antenna locked on the frequency of the subconscious universe—all of which are subject to the will of the personality-ego. Actually, none of these suppositions are true; although, in our left-brain dominated, personality-egocentric culture, we like to pretend they are. It seems to give us comfort, this idea that we are in control of our own artistic destinies.

All of these suppositions are premises underlying the plaudits given to the Hero-Artist. But the other kinds of artists, including those who seem to channel directly from the back-brain, are the exception that gives the lie to the myth. You can't pretend that Hero-Artists are the most important kind of artists, when the background is filled with other kinds of artists radiating on other wavelengths.

The Hero-Artist is best represented, in fact, by the consciously-willed art-making depicted in Soviet and fascist sculpture and illustration: art made under the dictatorship of the will of the proletariat. Beyond the obvious point that this way of art-making leads to a lot of bad political art, what it implies is that all of life is subject to the will alone, the will in action, the will dominating all other aspects of consciousness and action in the world. This is the dictatorship of the conscious-mind ego, and it is invariably a fragile dictatorship, unable to withstand much contradiction or criticism. Membership in ideology is enforced by brutality: the bullies knocking everyone else down on the playing field of life and art.

Poetry editors who believe, even unconsciously, in this worldview, have a hard time comprehending that poems often come to me when I don't want them to, when I'd rather be doing something. Yet the discipline of being a poet is to be ready at all times for a poem to happen, and to catch it in your net when it rises to the surface. Usually I have to drop everything to get it down before it evaporates. Ideas often come to me just as I'm falling asleep, and I must write them down quickly, to review them in the morning. Answers to problems I'm having with a piece of music, or a set of lyrics, often come this way. Your conscious mind is actually starting to shut down, and get out of the way. And that's often exactly when your clearest, best ideas appear. So much for will.

4. Really, who reads your poems anyway?

Seriously. I do not experience enough hubris to genuinely believe that many folks read any of my poems, or care to. It's a big universe out there. It's no surprise that nobody cares. Don't take it personally.

The only time posting a poem has even been an issue was when some anal-retentive editor did a browser search to confirm the poem had never ever appeared anywhere before. Seriously, if they're going to be that anal-retentive, that hard to please, do you really want to work with them? Well, it's a choice. But it's worth asking yourself what you intend to get out of it.

It's rare that someone new will stumble across a poem, and make a comment on it. It's rare for folks to care that much about it. It's even more rare for them to want to follow up.

5. Nonetheless, sometimes someone stumbles across one of your poems online and wants to (re)publish it.

That's a very nice moment of flattery, that someone noticed you and liked what they saw, and asked you for it. And sometimes for more. I get asked for some of my photography and visual art from time to time. I usually say yes. (Usually. Many requests repeat the mistake of thinking I should be flattered when they ask for something for free. If you really want to engage my interest, offer payment other than free "exposure.") When that happens, it makes you feel like all this art-making is actually worth it. That you're not alone and shouting into an alien universe with nary an echo returning. That somehow, you've managed to connect with at least one other person.

And that's the real birth of your audience. Odysseas Elytis, the Nobel-prize winning modern Greek poet, once opined, and I think this is true: Every poet needs an audience of three, and since every poet has two good friends, the search is always for that perfect third reader.

More Poems Without Categories

What appeals to me right now about most spiritual literature—sacred poetry, scripture, personal essays by religious and ex-religious, sacred mythologies and philosophies; which is the sort of reading I tend to do in that first hour of the day, when I'm still waking up, meditating, slowly starting my day so that it can go forward on an even keel—is the qualities of serenity and solace it brings. I need both. I am preparing for major life-changing surgery—on one level, just one more life-changing event among a long sequence of events over the past few years—and time is ticking down towards the scheduled date, after which everything is going to be different, physically different, with consequences and maybe, if hope is not too toxic a zone to enter, cures. Whatever happens, life will be different: for awhile, and perhaps permanently. There will be a recovery period, and another surgery, and another after that. Removal, reconstruction, completion.

I can conceptualize this several ways, as my mind seems to want to work metaphorically around the topic, at the moment, rather than clinically. I can think of it as the three-part structure Japanese Noh drama, joh-ha-kyu, with the long slow introduction in no-time, the building of the narrative force to a revelation of the pivotal character, and the rushing towards the denouement, the stylized dance of the central, almost divine character, accompanied by the small orchestra of percussion, voices, and flutes.

Knives flashing in the light, while I sleep. This god who lives among the pine trees, dancing with his fan covering most of his face. Just a watchful bright eye. The threads that bind us together, that suture the world into place. Flesh and stone, the rising mist over a pond, the way exposed guts steam in an air-conditioned slaughterhouse. My calves still ache from the last dance. There is just enough fog over the mind to drive my canoe sideways. The blood is the life, and the wine is the color of blood inside the veins before it oxidizes in the revealed air.

What keeps me going, some of these mornings, as I get ever closer to that day when everything will change, is the certain knowledge that none of it matters: I'm just one small leaf drifting on a pond, in the grand scheme, and the Universe is too large to care. There's solace in being small

Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,
a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.
If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things,
this is the best season of your life.
—Wu-Men

Keep it in perspective: don't let your mind be clouded by unnecessary things. Fear and worry fall into that category, although I have the habit of both. I inherited my mother's ability to brood over a cherished worry, and I do it well. One reason I've taken up gardening is to, literally, put those worries and fears into the ground: it really works, after an hour of my pushing my hands into the dirt, of planting, of weeding, of tending, I come back inside dirtier and more at peace. Gardening as spiritual exercise: a known connection amongst monastic communities for many centuries.

We are the driving ones.
Ah, but the step of time:
think of it as a dream
in what forever remains.

All that is hurrying
soon will be over with;
only what lasts can bring
us to the truth.

Young men, don't put your trust
into the trials of flight,
into the hot and quick.

All things already rest:
darkness and morning light,
flower and book.
—Rainer Maria Rilke

There are savagely judgmental postmodern poets who like to tell stories of the personal failings of great poets; there is glee in the telling. But are you behaving any better than the dead ones who didn't do so well? Whose dealings with the real world, with the so-called real world, were stuttering and problematic. At some point you have to realize that being a professional, whether poet or artist or philosopher, is not always the best option. We only turn professional as poets because our fingers are too manicured to stand in the flood and throw another sandbag on the levee. It's always about holding back the tide, when you turn professional, about mastering the forces of nature, about the triumph of engineering over chaos. To engineer is human, and so is failure. We learn a lot from what goes wrong. Even if that bridge is burned, we learn to build the next one better. If there had always been a happy ending, if Orpheus hadn't failed by turning on the last stair, his foot already half into the daylight, if he hadn't lost Eurydice in that turning, her shade falling back into the shadows—well, what would we have left to learn? What would we write about? The gift is in the failure. The gift of this long-term illness is how it has pared my life down to what really matters. You try to live a good life, and still, everything goes wrong. You do everything right, and follow all the right advice, and still you have to go forward knowing that none of might matter, in the end, that it could still fall apart at any second. There's some solace in knowing how fragile your plans are, some serenity. Still, something, as yet unnamed, comes into the gap, every time. Mind the gap: that last stair-step is the critical one.

Moon and clouds are the same;
mountain and valley are different.
All are blessed; all are blessed.
Is this one? Is this two?
—Wu-Men

When we separate the world into different parts, it's only conceptual. When we argue over different categories of poetry, over kind and type and style and worth, it's all in the mind. It's even less real than before. Does that make it a higher art form, because of its very abstraction, as some poets claim? In truth, it makes it lesser. Everyone likes their boxes. Ballet dancers conclude, after some consideration, that ballet is the highest artform. This would be a newsflash if it hadn't been reported, by ever artist for their own artform, a million times already. We like to think of ourselves as drawn towards the good and the beautiful. So we tend to think that what we like best, is the best, the most good, the most beautiful. That kind of conceptual engineering, though, builds walls around your boxes, rather than bridges to other game-tables. You are the spinning ball that locks itself inside a compartment of the roulette wheel and refuses to come out, not till the world stops spinning. But we live on a planet that never ceases its spinning. Add to that whirl of orbits, the sun's longer whirl around its own central star-pool. and you can see the truth of it: it's all vibration, all spinning, and nothing ever stops. What I like best is that there isn't anything to like best: it's all good. Is this one, or two? Your preference is as conceptual as your artistic abstractions: the result of prejudice and personal taste. It's not equally the same, but it's all blessed all the same. Every category, every box, equally blessed, when seen from on high.

When the mind is at peace,
the world too is at peace.
Nothing real, nothing absent.
Not holding on to reality,
not getting stuck in the void,
you are neither holy nor wise, just
an ordinary fellow who has completed his work.
—Layman P'ang

My mind is not noisy with desires, Lord,
and my heart has satisfied its longing.
I do not care about religion
or anything that is not you.
I have soothed and quieted my soul,
like a child at its mother's breast.
My soul is as peaceful as a child
sleeping in its mother's arms.
—Psalm 131

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(Poems excerpted from The Enlightened Heart: An anthology of sacred poetry, ed. by Stephen Mitchell.)

Literary-Critical Thoughts at Semi-Random 3

10. Don't give in to the tendency to describe your own work as the end-product of an evolutionary process.

There is often a tendency in critical essays that describe artistic progression or aesthetic development to arrive, in the end, at the -isms and schools the author likes, approves of, and, often enough, is a member of. You see this supremely self-serving tendency in academic overviews of poetry written by professional poets with an agenda to promote. It's always tempting to justify one's own poetry by placing one's artistic ancestors into a linear narrative.

But the study of how people write history has shown us that such narratives are always constructed, like linear narrative fiction. Usually such histories are at least partly subjective, since they are narratives meant to prove a point. History is rarely only about telling a story; there is usually an underlying ideology one can identify by looking at what is presented and what is left out. (A good example of how to perceive this inner agenda can be found in John Gallaher's dissection of a Tony Hoagland essay on poetic history.) The point is that self-serving histories cannot be called objective, since they do have an agenda which is not purely to tell a history.

The paradigmatic example of this egotistical progression is those old anthropological diagrams that showed how apes gradually evolved into man. These were accompaniments to densely written tomes describing the evolution of human cultures from primitive hunting and gathering societies to, naturally, the pinnacle of Western civilization. That Western anthropologists would proclaim Western civilization to be the pinnacle of human cultural evolution comes as no surprise, since most such tomes were written during the period of Western colonization of imperial rule over the more "primitive" parts of the globe. Western culture did develop a technical civilization unlike any other, through our ambitious mastery of fire: gunpowder, industrial mechanization, steam, electricity.

It's truly ironic when poets write essays about poetry that echo this pattern of placing oneself and one's poetic peers at the pinnacle of artistic evolution. Most post-avant poetry manifestos do this, in many cases directly echoing the early Modernist poetry manifestos of a century ago.

Poetry is fractured and diverse at this point in history. It seems like every poetic movement and -ism has to justify itself with a manifesto. You have to present your theory before you can present your art. Then and only then can you justify a poetry that no one cares about, that is totally obscurantist, and that only your fellow members of your -ism will read or care about, or respond to.

Placing yourself at the pinnacle of some artistic evolution is a way of constructing a narrative that justifies your art's existence in the face of existential insecurity. If on some level you're anxious about the worth and value of your art (and your self)—and what artist isn't occasionally anxious about their art?—this is a great way of giving yourself a narrative of worth. It's actually rather elitist in spirit.

11. You can't call yourself avant-garde if you're not actually doing anything new or different.

The irony is that post-avant, postmodernist poetry is not an ongoing avant-garde, it is artistic Mannerism. The contemporary post-avant refers constantly to the avant-garde of a century ago to legitimize its perpetual rebellion, even when those rebelling have already become the professional poetry establishment. "All avant-garde all the time" is the motto. The Mexican poet-critic Octavio Paz, Nobel laureate and renowned poet, had this to say about avant-gardism:

Many have commented on the disappearance of a true avant-garde and its replacement by avant-gardism. . . . I see this as a prolongation of experimentation usually leading further on from collage and montage into ever-increasing fragmentation and eventually into a degenerative disease which, adapting an already common usage, I call "disjunctivitis." The argument, used by some producers who, correctly locating the seats of available power in the academy, have ensconced themselves therein every bit as much as the establishment "mainstream," to the effect that the disruption of the common linguistic coin is part of a war against "late-capitalist" discourse is singularly inept. I do not see oppressed workers of any kind devouring the products of avant-gardism. The death-of-the-author thematics, as commonly adapted, are another inanity: when society does its very best to homogenize us, what is wrong with a strong, knowledgeable, and responsible ego crying in the darkening wilderness?

As Paz points out, lots of post-avant poets claim to be rebelling against a poetic establishment which doesn't really exist. Lots of straw-men as set up to be knocked over, but they're set as myths that don't actually reflect the true nature of things. There isn't anything to actually rebel against, so a narrative of rebellion has to be constructed, usually via manifesto, laying out a narrative of oppression that justifies generating one's own avant-garde.

As I have said before, postmodernism is really Late High Modernism. It's not really anything new; it's at best something that comes after. If it were really new, postmodernism wouldn't need to include "Modernism" in its very name. So it is a reactive -ism, not a genuinely new alternative. It is in fact the decadent, mannerist end-point of the Modernist ideal that began in the arts a century ago.

There was a genuine avant-garde a century ago, creating new kinds of poetry, aesthetic theory, and artistic expression which actually were rebelling against 50 or 100 years of enforced artistic stagnation. Post-avant poets nowadays insist on their innovative status, but in fact they're still rebelling against the phantoms of fixed forms that were first rebelled against by the genuine avant-garde of a century ago.

it's hilarious nowadays to hear post-avant manifestos use Marxist and Freudian ideologies to justify their reasoning, since Marx and Freud have long since passed into the history of ideas as no longer descriptive of life as we actually live it and know it nowadays. Marxist theory in the arts is doubly hilarious because, as Paz says, there is no proletariat supporting the post-avant's artistic uprising. Power to the people? The "people" are mostly ignoring you, or yawning.

Which of course is the root of anxiety that one's art might in truth be irrelevant. Which leads to the fictive histories mentioned above, which generates manifestos to justify one's avant-gardism, and which also leads to the formation (via those manifestos) of cliques and elites within poetic -isms.

An absurd aspect of poetic avant-gardism is its conformity. A lot of post-avant manifestos praise individualism and uniqueness as elements of their forever-rebellion, but in fact a lot of the members of any given -ism tend to all sound alike. They experiment in the same ways on the same materials. You get a lot of variations on a theme, rather than a genuinely new theme.

In order to make a poem sound hip, for example, a lot of pop culture references get included to make the poem sound contemporary and relevant. This often ends up sounding like name-dropping and product-placement. Frank O'Hara could pull this method off, but many of his followers cannot. Conformity is symptomatic of followers and disciples trying to imitate a master's style, and not being able to grasp the master's intent from the inside. This is largely because their hearts aren't in it, only their minds: there is no original impulse driving the content, only an imitation of form and means. They end up imitating the surface elements of the style, without grasping the original impulse that generated the style.

This is surprisingly true of many contemporary haiku poets, who imitate the japanese haiku masters without really feeling the poetic impulse from the inside. It is particularly noticeable among imitators of Buson, rather than Basho.

12. There is a genuinely new art happening, but it doesn't appear on the radar very often.

Or maybe it's a really old art, with an old set of values, trying to re be restored and re-integrated with what we've learned from the new art.

Usually genuinely new art, and new approaches to art-making, happens under the radar for a long time before anyone notices them. People quietly experiment, play with their materials, and discover something new. Sometimes it happens when familiar things are put together in a new way, generating a new viewpoint or way of thinking about them.

A century ago in literature, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein (and a few others) took the familiar forms of linear-narrative fiction and found new ways of forming them. Some of those forms were non-linear, others were means to go deeper into narrative, or to explore psychological realism without much actual plot happening. This was both a completely new way of thinking about narrative, and a new way of expressing time.

That these new ways of performing narrative remain controversial, and still somewhat below the radar, says not much about the value of experimental literature per se, but it does say a great deal about the context and environment in which these experiments are undertaken.

It doesn't really matter that Joyce, Woolf, and Stein didn't overturn the novel, or forever change the ways in which fiction is written and read. In truth, most readers still like to read a straightforward linear narrative: story narrative is still king. (What this says about general mob psychology can be described on the symbolic, archetypal level by acknowledging that the rate of cultural change is usually only as rapid as its slowest members can sustain. The tribe is inherently conservative, as it carries a lot of inertia.) It doesn't really matter if literary experiments didn't become the new mainstream: experiments are not always meant to replace anything. They were experiments, a word that implies questing, researching, exploring, and trying new solutions, and doesn't exclude the possibility of failure. Call this Modernist avant-garde the experimental science of literature in the early 20th Century.

What Octavio Paz calls "disjunctivitis" in poetry began with the Symbolists, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, their peers and their forebears. When free verse and the prose-poem were first introduced, they were below the poetry mainstream's radar, and stayed there for some time. Then came the simultaneous discovery, acrimony, and plaudits. From these roots we ended up post-avant language-based poetry that disconnects the words on the page from all referent to the real world, or to the inner universe of consciousness.

I see hints, now and then, of the return of several things to poetry, which remain under the radar partly because they would be dismissed out of hand by the new post-avant mandarins of literary fashion, who are themselves become the new establishment. Elements of this eternal return include:

• deep psychology, by which I mean an archetypal psychology, Jung rather than Freud, which is a transpersonal and affirming psychology, rather than the current fashion for dysfunctional psychology manifest as confessional poetry (which is always confessions about the bad stuff in life, you might have noticed), or as acedia poetry that is disassociative from the soma, and from other aspects of psychology.

• a renewed emphasis on words as transparent carriers of meaning, rather than being ends in themselves. The experiment of Language Poetry, still dominant in critical circles, is beginning to fade in practice, if not yet in theory.

• poetry that is in the lineage of Rilke's Thing-poetry; of Lorca's duende and mining of the strata of existence that also generates Surrealism; and of Robert Bly's formulation of "leaping poetry," which he describes as poetry that "leaps" from the conscious, cerebral, intellectual mind suddenly into the subconscious, archetypal, shamanic, mythic mind, and thereby gains power and resonance.

With this last point, I am perhaps committing the sin of placing myself at the end of an evolutionary chain, since this lineage of poetry—Rilke, Lorca, et al.—is one I feel I belong to, if only as a distant descendant with no real claim to any substantive inheritance. It is the type of poetry happening with some poets, again mostly below the radar, that I feel kinship with. This cluster includes several of the West Coast poets such Jeffers, Snyder, Everson, and others such as Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, jane Hirshfield, et al. And other poets who I've run across, whose books carry a definite mythopoetic charge, most of whom are relatively unknown, and are definitely under-recognized in the professional poetry world of MFA programs and academic criticism. (If anyone's interested, I'll compile a list from within my personal poetry library at some point, when I have a significant chunk of time.)

Nonetheless, I feel this revival of the archaic, the archetypal, the "primitive," is creating a genuine revival of soul in some contemporary poets' work. I can connect this to several similar upwellings of the old powers that are seeking to integrate with the new, to create something that will live and endure. At root, this poetry seeks to re-enliven contemporary poetry, and cure it of its overwhelming acedia.

The keyword here is integration.

There are parallel developments happening in philosophy, in which some younger thinkers are trying to restore to philosophy its interest in ethics and soul, as well as in pure reason. At the end of the Medieval period, in the Western history of ideas, at the beginning of Renaissance and continuing into the 17th C. Enlightenment period, myth and superstition gave way to reason, the scientific method of experimental observation, and ultimately to the logical-positivist, materialist worldview. This led to the development and triumph of a technological, instrumentality-based civilization. But now, three hundred years later, there is a desire to re-enchant the world that science and philosophical reasoning have disenchanted, have divorced from body and soul. There is concern that technology divorced from ethics produces catastrophe, manifest as environmental degradation, overpopulation pressure, and even nuclear holocaust. There are now philosophers and scientists seeking to restore soul to reason, and to integrate them into a synergistic, greater whole. And there are scientists trying to do the same, from the opposite direction.

In poetry, a parallel revival and integration of the mythic, epic, bardic/skaldic, and prophetic/vatic modes of poetry is beginning to emerge—more properly, has been emerging for some time, but has largely been dismissed by the mandarins of postmodernist mannerism—to stand alongside the currently dominant poetic modes of the personal (post-confessional, narcissistic) lyric, the language-oriented word-play-based "clever" poem, the didactic/philosophical poem, and the prevalent "workshop" poem (usually some small observational slice-of-life irrelevant to anyone but the poet and her friends).

So there is hope for the future of poetry. Really, there never was any doubt. It's a basic law of art and psychology alike that whatever is discarded or repressed will eventually return from the shadows in a new form.

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Literary-Critical Thoughts at Semi-Random

Literary-Critical Thoughts at Semi-Random 2