Conceptual Poetry: Shrug

In the ongoing, often heated debate about conceptual poetry, some voices have a more grounded analysis than others. One of these is Robert Archambeau, of Samizdat blog, who recently contributed an article to a Poetry Foundation roundup about all this brouhaha:

Charmless and Interesting: What Conceptual Poetry Lacks and What It's Got:

Fourteen months after reading at the White House, Kenneth Goldsmith found himself in the real center of American power: cable television. His appearance on The Colbert Report, though, coincided not with a general celebration of the conceptual poetics with which he is associated, but with two stinging attacks on such poetics: one by the young poet Amy King in The Rumpus, and another by the esteemed poet-critic Calvin Bedient in Boston Review. King’s criticism revolved around the idea of conceptualism as an in-group phenomenon, and on the hypocrisy of conceptual poets striking anti-establishment poses while simultaneously seeking, and beginning to find, such laurels as the established institutions of American poetry have to offer. Bedient’s article criticized conceptualism for a lack of concern with emotion and affect, which he linked with both a truncating of poetry’s possibilities and a kind of reactionary political stance. People’s responses to these criticisms, to judge by the emails, texts, phone calls, and Facebook messages I received, were passionate—half of my friends in the little world of poetry expressed delight that the horrible careerist bastards were finally getting called out for their sins, while the other half spluttered in outrage at those who dared try to quench the glorious yet fragile flames of poetic innovation.

This is a moment, then, for an assessment of the virtues and vices of conceptual poetry. What does conceptual poetry lack, compared to other poetries, and what does it have to offer? Any brief answer will, of course, be too general, but we can begin to sketch things out with reference to two aesthetic categories: the charming and the interesting. Whatever else conceptualism has got going for it, it lacks—at least in its pure form—the former. And whether one likes conceptualism or not, anyone who has engaged with it has found that it has, wonderfully or frustratingly, got plenty of the latter. . . .

I encourage the interested reader to peruse the rest of this article first, as what I am writing here is essentially a response to Mr. Archambeau.

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My fundamental reaction to the brouhaha of pro/con argument regarding conceptual poetry as currently practiced is a resounding "Meh."

I shrug at the idea that anybody really cares about any of this except those already engaged in defining the argument and nature of conceptual poetry. While I highly respect Kenneth Goldsmith as an archivist and cultural bellwether, in my opinion his ideas about conceptual poetry, as most such are, give me nothing but smoke and mirrors, an no meat on the bone. I feel like Mr. Archambeau has come up with a very good synopsis of the whole situation, in his article, although he very politely avoids ripping the curtains aside to reveal the non-wizards behind them.

Conceptual poetry is, like conceptual art—and the point has been made that poetry lags behind the other arts in which this battle over conceptualism has already been fought and settled—the idea that once you understand the concept behind a poetic work, you don't actually have to read the work: the concept IS the artwork, the idea itself is what you are supposed to perceive as the aesthetic moment, while the artistic product itself is unimportant.

This applies to a lot of writing that is exactly like sample-based music: sampling art made by other artists, over which one layers one's own rap, or concept. It applies to re-writing an existing poem, to recontextualize it as a new work simply by putting a new frame around it. (This is not the same as John Cage's practice of, say, "Writing Through Finnegan's Wake," because Cage used an existing text to make a new experience of the text in a new way, which is a lot more than merely placing a new dust cover on an existing book.) You see a lot of writing nowadays made by doing a web search online then assembling a "found" text as a new work. Much conceptual poetry is anti-originality and anti-writing. A lot of it is about sampling, often without changing anything.

Of course, another way to think about this kind of poetry is that it really is nothing new, but rather is mannerist, or in the art-historical sense, Mannerist.

That is, self-referential (as opposed to observational or original), decadent (as in not interested in doing anything other than forms of conceptual quasi-masturbation), and late-historical in the sense that it is the end of an artistic epoch rather than itself being a new artistic epoch (post-modernism is to Modernism as Mannerism was to the Baroque, a recycling in exaggerated form of already-existing ideas). I see all of that in "pure conceptualism," especially when one considers that the idea that one doesn't actually need to see the art or read the poem to get the concept is an idea that Marcel Duchamp and the Dadaists already did. Arguably, Duchamp did it better, too, and not just because he was first, but because he was a better artist. Similarly, "found" poetry is a very old practice.

I would think more of conceptualism if it actually had something new to present, either in terms of idea or in terms of product—but it doesn't. And that is precisely why it lacks all charm, even though it can be interesting.

And I do find it interesting. But most of it, having encountered it once, doesn't ever need to be encountered again. Like puzzles, once you solve it, there's no point in doing it again. There's no discovery in repeating the problem-solving experience because you already know the outcome.

And that is the problem in a nutshell: art needs to be charming—engaging, enticing, enveloping, inviting—not just interesting. I mean, if there's no point in having an audience, even if that audience is just a few friends, what's the point? Pleasuring oneself alone? (The dreaded M word again.)

"Interesting" in this context is just mental. There's no soma to it, no body, no sensuality—and they're PROUD of that. But art is an experience, not just a mental game. I've written before on the point that poetry that appeals only to the intellect is ultimately going to fail, and fail to have any kind of audience other than those who make it. Sound familiar? (Here again. And here.)

I find it hilarious when poets complain about lacking any kind of significant popular audience when they have worked so hard to create that very situation in which no one is interested in what they're doing.

"Charm" on the other hand is precisely what attracts us to poetry, or art, or dance, or music, which is as much as about embodied sensuality as it is about intellectual interest. In the context of conceptual poetry, "charm" is actively negated. So is anything but purely intellectual interest and engagement. This wing of the contemporary avant-garde in poetry, which sometimes oxymoronically calls itself the post-avant, is very much about disengagement, unoriginality, disembodiment, and disenchantment. I view it as an artistic dead-end. It might be very interesting in the present moment, but ultimately there's no man behind the curtain: he has been willfully removed.

So I remain unconvinced by the arguments supporting conceptual poetry—it should be said that some practitioners, like Mr. Goldsmith, seem to enact arguing about conceptual poetry as a form of performance art in its own right. I don't have a strong argument about the contents themselves of conceptual poetry, which for the most part are uninteresting, and deliberately so. I regard the meta-concept (the conception of conceptual poetry) to be itself fundamentally mannerist, and the arguments in favor of the meta-concept to be often transparently, hilariously inept. It's as if we all know that there's no man behind the curtain, but we all must wink at each other knowingly as we pretend otherwise. It's all a game. It's writing about writing that pretends to itself be writing: a labyrinth of recursive mirrors at a party hosted by narcissists.

A Painting Journal

Aurorae, acrylic on paper, 2012

A painting journal

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

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

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Thursday, November 8
4:16 PM

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

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

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

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

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

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

The painting darkens but the lights still shine through.

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Thursday, November 8
4:46 PM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Thursday, November 8
5:16 PM

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pause to make dinner. Ravel solo piano music.

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Friday, November 9
11:45 AM

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

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

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

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

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

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Saturday, November 10
12:34 PM

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

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

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

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Monday, November 12
2:07 PM

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

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

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

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

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

Standing By Words

April is annually dedicated as National Poetry Month. There is even an annual proclamation that comes out of the White House. (Another annual White House tradition of course is to have the President use his executive powers to pardon a turkey every Thanksgiving, which then lives out its life to its normal lifespan, and is not eaten.) What does National Poetry Month mean? Not much, really. It means that many stereotypical events happen, mostly.

Many poetry workshops and organizations sponsor "A Poem A Day" rallies, wherein participating poets are invited to write a poem a day and share them. Poetry readings multiply in number for a month. Poetry is given a higher public awareness profile for a month, after which most non-poets go back to completely ignoring it. Schools often teach a month-long unit on poetry study and writing.

I rarely take any of this seriously. I have in the past, when I was involved with online poetry workshops, occasionally participated in poem-a-day gatherings. But as I have often pointed out, I write when I write, and when I write on demand it usually sucks. I can recall perhaps two, maybe three, poems written by myself during poem-a-day rallies that were worth salvaging, rewriting, and finishing.

Always excepting haiku, of course, which I can pretty much write on demand—which are also pretty much the only kinds of poems that I can write on demand. I'm not really sure I can explain why haiku come easily to me. Perhaps it's the result of lifelong immersion in their aesthetic. It's true that when I'm sorting through photographs, as for example I am still doing after the recent roadtrip out West, I often am spontaneously moved to write poems to go with the photos. More often than not, those poems written to photo prompts are haiku. This is also of course a variety of ekphrastic poetry: written in response to visual art.

Anyway.

I've managed to ignore National Poetry Month this year for most of the month. Now, however, I find myself reading as I often do books of poetry criticism by poets. This is actually some of my favorite reading: books by writers about writing. I have quite a stack of such books, which I add to from time to time. So, this year, what I will do to memorialize National Poetry Month is give some excerpts and quotes regarding books on poetry by poets.

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Wendell Berry is one of our greatest living writers. A national treasure, his books are on a special shelf in my library next to others I feel are essential reading. He is a poet, a novelist, and an important essayist. His viewpoint is rural, conservative in the sense of conserving what is good and real and true, and rooted in his day job, which is farming. Many of his poems are accessible windows onto the philosophy of rural life, and the way of the earth. At times Berry seems to reflect a very deep land-based, earthen, belief system, something that all people who have lived close to the land have shared, regardless of whatever religion they nominally follow. The flow of seasons and the life of the land is a deeper system than received beliefs.

I have been reading Wendell Berry's book of six long essays about poetry, Standing By Words. I find reading Berry's essays on poetry to be essential, even when I disagree with them—which I do moderately often, finding them to be even reactionary at times. Rural myself, I am not as traditional as he. Yet Berry's voice is one of those you must encounter and deal with, regardless of whether you end up agreeing with him or not. He must be confronted and reconciled. Reading Berry helps you figure out your own stance, your own values and opinions. He is incredibly well-read, has a good grasp of the history of literature, and thoughtfully explains his positions. His writing is among the clearest of essayists', his thinking always presented without affectation or unnecessary device. There is an elegant simplicity in his writing that one can learn from, simply by reading.

Although Berry's opinions do feel to me sometimes to be reactionary and anti-modern, overall his views on poetry are congenial to my own approach and attitude. When he writes about what has gone wrong with contemporary poetry, I often find myself in agreement; although I may not always agree on the historical choices that led to the current situation, nor with his proposed remedies. We share a concern with where poetry may have gone off the rails, even if we don't always agree on how to restore it to life.

The basic premise of Standing By Words is encapsulated by a quote from the book itself:

My impression is that we have seen, for perhaps one hundred and fifty years, a gradual increase in language that is either meaningless or destructive of meaning. And I believe that this increasing unreliability of language parallels the increasing disintegration, over the same period, of persons and communities.

Berry makes the connection between the debasement of artistic language and the debasement of general language usage, from broadcasting to the political sphere, where the loss is particularly toxic. Politicians who one day say one thing, the next day say something opposite and deny that they ever said what they said before—in other words, blatant unabashed lying—are prominent and obvious more so than ever. The obfuscation of clarity that is the essence of bureaucratic writing has led to deliberate misuse of language. If you don't feel you can trust people in positions of authority to tell you the truth anymore, you are not alone. Berry is not making causative connections here; rather he believes that both artistic and general language have become debased from the same root causes, which are inherent to and reflected by the Modernist enterprise: social fragmentation, the loss of moral center in culture, the sense of uncertainty about what really matters in life that began with the Industrial Revolution and reached a peak of global insecurity in the 20th C.

None of this is strictly necessary. We have taken fragmentation and disconnection and disjunction and existential angst to be the norm. In fact, Berry argues, they're relatively new phenomena, and are connected with the changes in culture that began during the beginning of the radical changes in technical craft, when the agrarian norm morphed into the new urban industrial norm. With the rise of the Romantic period in the arts, there also arose the romantic myth of the solitary, suffering Artist. (Starving Artist, Lone Misunderstood Sensitive Artist, and all the other variations on the theme of Artist-as-Other.)

In the essay "The Specialization of Poetry," Berry writes:

History certainly offers examples of unhappy or obsessed or mad poets, but it offers more examples of poets who sang or wrote in the exuberance of sanity, health, wholeness of spirit. One instantly credits Ann Sexton's statement that "Pain engraves a deeper memory," not because one believes it invariably does, but because one senses, in the modesty and brevity of the sentence, the probability that it sometimes does. . . . One is simply aware of too much joyous poetry that has been the gift of the Muse, who apparently leaves the ratio of pain and joy to be determined by the poet. To attribute to the Muse a special fondness for pain is to come too close to desiring and cultivating pain. There is, I believe, some currency to the assumption that a fragmented, diseased people can make a whole and healthy art out of their fragmentation and disease. It has not yet been done.

This is a refusal to accept that all artists make art primarily from their wounds, which is one of the most toxic myths about creativity ever. It can be laid squarely at the feet of the Romantic period, wherein the suffering genius artists was first given us as a stereotype. Yet art that endures isn't the art of pain and suffering, it's the art that exalts. Pain is not ignored, nor denied, but it isn't the end-point. There is transcendence.

The danger may not be so much in the overcultivation of sensibility as in its exclusive cultivation. Sensibility becomes the inescapable stock in trade of the isolated poet, who is increasingly cut off from song and story because the nature of these is communal. And isolation, or the sense of isolation, is moving much of our poetry toward the tone, rhythm, and structure of what Mark Strand calls "not overly excited discourse." This is what Denise Levertov calls "an unexampled production of notations: poems which tell of things seen or done, but . . . do not impart a sense of the experience of seeing or doing, or of the value of such experience. . . ." The union of overcultivated sensibility and undercultivated verse cannot produce song. It produces—not prose—but the prosaic, unessential prose. The art does not press hard enough against experience.

Human life is a full range of sensibilities, a full range of experience, of emotion, of the creation of memory. To stay in one mode—fragmentation, disconnection, disjunction, expressing as it all too often does urban angst and Modernist disassociation—is to neglect all the others. To write poems in only one mode means incompleteness. What Levertov is talking about is the same thing that Adrienne Rich talked about: rather than being something written about an experience, a poem should be an experience. When art doesn't press hard enough against experience it becomes virtual, itself disconnected, and doesn't recreate an experience in the reader, it just tells us about one.

Song is natural; we have it common with animals. For humans, it is also artificial and traditional; it has to be made by someone who knows how to make it and sung to someone who will recognize it as song. Rhythm, fundamental to it, is its profoundest reference. The rhythm of a song or a poem rises, no doubt, in reference to the pulse and breath of the poet, as is often repeated, but that is still too specialized an accountingl it rises also in reference to daily and seasonal—and surely even longer—rhythms in the life of the poet and in the life that surrounds him. The rhythm of a poem resonates with these larger rhythms that surround it; it fills its environment with sympathetic vibrations. Rhyme, which is a function of rhythm, may suggest this sort of resonance; it marks the coincidences of smaller structures with larger ones, as when the day, the month, and the year all end at the same moment. Song, then, is a force opposed to specialty and to isolation. It is the testimony of the singer's inescapable relation to the world, to the human community, and also to tradition.

Obviously I would appreciate any musical definition of poetry. (Even though I have at times questioned the many, many times that poets look to music for their definitions and terminology of discourse—not because I think that's wrong in any way, but because it soundly refutes the arguments that some poets make that claim poetry to be a "higher," more abstract artform than music. If poetry is actually more abstract than music, why do you need music's language to discuss poetry? Which becomes the more fundamental artform, then?) Obviously I am likely to agree that poetry needs to have both song and meaning. Well, I do mostly agree.

At a basic level, the entire cosmos is singing: every atom in the universe is vibrating, and according to M-theory even the subatomic particles that make up atoms are vibrating strings of matter/energy. The tiniest level of resolution of scale in the Universe, the smallest particles on the smallest level, are not a void but rather a dancing foam.

Everything in the Universe is vibration: this has been said not only by theoretical physicists but by seers in every religious tradition. The universe is frozen music: what we perceive as solid matter is in fact just slower-moving energy, but everything is still vibrating. Song is the basic organizing principle of the Universe: "in the beginning was the Word. . . ."

Where i do not agree with Berry is his implication that rhyme is therefore fundamental to poetry, because it shares its nature with rhythm. Rhythm, in poetry, is usually called meter. (Again, we're stuck in terms borrowed from music theory.) It can indeed be argued that rhyme, in some conceptual or literal form, is essential to poetry. It can be just as easily argued that poetry is not limited to requiring rhyme, especially where that usage is superficial and literal, blatant and clichéd: you do not create new music only by imitating old music, despite a reverence for tradition. It can be argued that music is organized sounds in time—and that definition can also apply to poetry—without requiring any other aspect of sound that we commonly associate with music. Tradition is defined by cultural expectations of normative forms. But cultural expectations are local, and both musical and poetic traditions vary widely across the breadth of the planet, and over time. The breaking of normative forms to discover or invent new ones is inherent to the creation of new art. Traditions are not static; they never were. Every tradition was once an invention; it is only time that makes it seem to have been always, eternally existent.

Actually, I agree with Berry that poetry that functions purely on the sounds of language, ignoring what that language refers to, to be mostly meaningless. I like pure sounds, I even like language as pure sound, and I've composed music that uses words as its constituent sonic components. But poetry on the page that is purely language-oriented poetry is sensibility rather than sense, to use Berry's own terms. It is exactly the kind of poetry that he finds lacks song and story. On this we agree.

But even more suggestive of the specialization of contemporary poets is their estrangement from storytelling. Typically, one can find this debility cited as a virtue and a goal.

I agree with that, but Berry goes on to a long discussion of narrative, particularly the loss of narrative used in poetry over the past century. This is where Berry sometimes gets a bit reactionary for my taste. In lauding tradition, he sometimes tramples on innovation. He is right to point out that the new does not have to replace the old, but can coexist alongside:

Why is it necessary for poets to believe, like salesmen, that the new inevitably must replace or destroy the old? Why cannot poetry renew itself and advance into new circumstance by adding the new to the old? Why cannot the critical faculty, in poets and critics alike, undertake to see that the best of the new is grafted to the best of the old? Free verse, for instance, is a diminishment of the competence of poetry if it is seen as replacing traditional prosody; it is an enlargement only if it is conceived as an addition. Freedom from narrative is a diminishment—it is not even a freedom—unless it is included with the capability of narrative among the live possibilities of poetry.

This is a plea to not throw the old out in favor of the new. I agree with that, yet at the same time I don't privilege tradition over innovation. I don't reject the new in favor of the old. I think there is room for both, and innovation does indeed add to the tradition. It doesn't have to replace it.

But this is where Berry gets interesting, for me. I have written before about the re-enchantment of poetry, of art, about bringing the soul back into work that often seems too dry, too intellectual, too disconnected from anything but the idea of the body, rather than body itself.

. . . our malaise, both in our art and in our lives, is that we have lost sight of the possibility of right or responsible action. Publicly, we have delegated our capacity to act to men who are capable of action only because they cannot think. Privately, as in much of our poetry, we communicate by ironic or cynical allusions to that debased tale of futility, victimization, and defeat, which we seem to have elected to be our story. The prevailing tendency, in poetry and out, is to see people not as actors, but as sufferers. . . . To how great an extent is modern poetry the record of highly refined sensibilities that could think or feel but not do? And must not this passiveness of the poetic sensibility force its withdrawal into the world of words where, for want of sustenance of action, it becomes despondent and self-destructive? . . .

In the last ten years there has been a reaction against this passivity. But for the most part this has produced only protest, which is either a gesture and not an action at all, or a negative action that either repudiates or opposes. The shallowness of protest is in this negativity; it is also in the short-winded righteousness by which it condemns evils for which it accepts no responsibility. In itself, protest implies no discipline and no correction. . . . That we have no poets who are, in that sense, public persons suggests even more forcibly the weakness of our poetry of protest. In his protest, the contemporary poet is speaking publicly, but not as a spokesman; he is only one outraged citizen speaking at other citizens who do not know him, whom he does not know, and with whom he does not sympathize. The tone of self-righteousness is one result of this circumstance.

The vast majority of contemporary poets never seem to even think about any of this, except perhaps to avoid discussing it. Sincerity is far less fashionable than irony and cynicism. Actually having something to say seems far less interesting to many than the fact that they want to express themselves about something, anything. One sign of the times is the retreat into narcissism, which leads us towards the self-absorbed self-confessional lyric. Another sign is the focus on technique over subject, which leads us to the word-games and puzzle-box crowd. Yet another sign is the (frankly neo-conservative) reactionary attitude of the neo-formalists, which is largely an attempt to simply roll back the clock of artistic progress, no matter what rhetoric they use to veil their purpose.

Berry's response is not to ally himself with the neo-formalists, despite his reverence for tradition, because he does not restrict himself as a poet so obviously. Rather, his response is flexible in form, fluid in approach, if essentially non-Modernist. Berry's poetry and attitude occasionally reminds me of Robinson Jeffers, in that both seek (or sought) a poetry for modern times that is not self-consciously Modernist, and do not believe that fragmentation and disjunction are necessary or sufficient. There is also an affinity in Berry's work for the pastoral tradition—which seems obvious, given Berry's agrarian roots, yet I don't hear it stated that way very often—leading back to the English pastoral poets, but also encompassing contemporary poets like Gary Snyder, William Everson, and Linda Hasselstrom. Poets who extend the oldest human values of all.

Elsewhere in Standing By Words, Berry speaks positively of Gary Snyder, who is one of the few poets who do succeed in making a new poetry rooted in the very old; Snyder has openly stated that his values are not Modernist, but Paleolithic, encompassing ecology, myth, bioregionalism, and human partnership with the land. (Which is one reason Snyder is one of my own touchstones as a poet.)

What Berry is describing in the passage above are the conditions of artistic mannerism, which I have also discussed before: the retreat from engagement with the world, and the simultaneous focus on the small and inward.

I think there's a hunger for the poetry that Berry describes. I see this partly in the revival of interest around poets engaged with the world, with social issues as well as ecological ones. Snyder has already been mentioned. But the revival of the reputation of Robinson Jeffers reflects this trend, as does the growing revival of interest in Jeffers' disciple William Everson. Hayden Carruth is another. On the same page as Snyder, with his interest in and promotion of deep ecological values and the relevance of Paleolithic myths and values to modern life, is Clayton Eshleman. There are others.

Despite the cynicism of many of the louder voices in contemporary poetry—one notices that this cynicism is often simultaneous with urbanism and the view that humanity is more interesting than anything else in the world—there is a growing re-enchantment with the older values found in the land. Wendell Berry speaks most elegantly of this. His ideas are well worth our discussion, even if at times his ideas seem reactionary rather than revolutionary. I have tremendous respect for him as a person, and a writer. I find myself enjoying his writing style so much that he can almost talk me into agreeing with him even in those areas where I don't. The world is more alive when he describes it. That too is a kind of re-enchantment, a valuable one.

Songwriting: Storytelling

Having bit the bullet and admitted that I might as well accept the label of songwriter for myself, even at my advanced career age, I have been exploring the terrain, finding out what's out there and what people expect. I've looked into the available networking resources. I've subscribed to American Songwriter magazine, which, unlike many other music mags, is really still more about the music than about celebrity artists and musical gear. In the January/February 2012 issue, which is a Bob Dylan 50th anniversary tribute issue, there are great interviews with Joan Baez and T Bone Burnett. It was a segment of the latter interview that got me thinking this morning, as I sat in my usual morning reading chair, still huddled in night's blankets, starting my day. Here's the exchange that caught my eye:

Do you have an overarching philosophy when it comes to producing?

I've been through so many different stages in my own life. The thing that's been consistent all the way through it is that at the base it's storytelling. All record making, all songwriting, all singing is storytelling. I've always tried to keep that in mind. First you look for the voice.

So you focus mainly on the vocals rather than the music of the sound of an album?

The sound of the music is completely dependent on the sound of the voice. That's reality. The instruments are more or less the same. The human being is completely different. Of course, I don't mean all instruments are exactly the same. There are great and bad sounding instruments, but even bad ones can make a beautiful tone. The person and the voice are so distinct that it changes the way you make sound out of either good or bad instruments. It's about blending the instruments with the tone of the voice.
—T Bone Burnett, interviewed by Hal Bienstock, "T Bone Burnett: The Taste Maker," American Songwriter, January/February 2012, p. 41

The voice is the original instrument. It's integral to the human body. The voice rises out of the center of the body, rises up through the torso, and out through the throat and mouth. The sound is shaped by all these factors, as well as general health. I've noticed that my own singing voice, which was never a robust instrument as an adult, has changed in the past few years when I was at my sickest, and as I've recovered. I have more strength now, more tone, although I'm still not a loud singer. Voices are very individual: you cannot actually standardize the human voice the way you can standardize the manufacture of a guitar or piano, because we're all different. There are some various types that one can identify, certain styles and approaches, but within those parameters there is still a lot of individuality.

One of the things that I've noticed lately in the current wave of over-produced pop stars is that has seemed to be an effort to standardize an interchangeable pop star voice; you may have noticed how pop voices sound more alike now than they ever have, with almost no variation in singer's tone or range. Some of that is because the production is being standardized, and there is a currently a fashion for highly-processed vocals, and a ridiculous fashion on top of that for semi-vocoded voices, so that tone and pitch all sound slightly robotic rather than human. I hope that's a fashion that dies soon, but I'm not holding my breath.

Elsewhere in the interview, Burnett is asked about the current American roots music revival—roots music being the old folk songs and styles, which not only are being researched and performed as they were, but are being used as the basis for new songs by young bands.

It seems like the public has become a lot more interested in roots music over the past decade than it was in the '80s and '90s. What do you attribute that to?

There are a couple of big trends going on in the world. One is towards globalization, the other is localization or tribalism. This is the music of our tribe. The Scots-Irish, Black people, Italians, the people that came here and started cooking up this music. I think things have gotten very depersonalized in the modern world. It started in the 20th century, the century of the self. This is a way to touch base. There songs are hundreds of years old, but they've been rewritten and grown into all kinds of things.

Does roots music speak to a longing for something more authentic?

I think there's always that. My view is that we live in a very de-authenticated world, especially in music. All music has been deauthenticated because it has been compromised so heavily by current technology.
—T Bone Burnett, ibid.

I find the current Top 40 pop music using perfected artificial voices and vocoders to be mannerist, decadent, the result of the end of an artistic era's process. It's representative of the cyberization of late-Modernist culture, in which people aren't sure where they end and their machines begin. Cyberneticists thought about all this in the 60s, and what we're seeing now with people (like me) using their smartphones and tablet computing devices for almost everything has been written about for decades in futurist circles as well as in science fiction. Amazingly thoughtful artistic projects such as the SF anime TV series Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex (based on the manga by Shirow Masamune) ask the question: what happens to culture, and to ourselves, when we stop being able to tell what parts of us are human and what parts are cyberized? Some of the mannerist music being made nowadays reflects an enormous if unconscious anxiety about these questions, reflected especially in the cyberized voices of the singers and the metric perfection of rhythm tracks created using digital beatboxes and instrumental parts that are never out-of-tune because they're produced and filtered using software synthesizers.

The end result is rather lifeless. It often seems like in pop music the machine has already won. After all, humans are an adaptable species; we often take on the shape of our surroundings, affected by geography, climate, nutrition, noosphere. We can certainly adapt to the cyberized future—as both represented in and thought about in pop cultural literature such as cyberpunk, and pop cultural music such as vocoded Top 40 radio. So we adapt, and change, and are changed. And we respond to digital perfection by looking for the unpredictable artistic glitch, the places the machines fail, the noise that often hides the signal—and so we get musical genres such as aleatoric music, noise music, and dubstep. We also get the soundtrack to the cyber movie Tron: Legacy, or the soundtracks to the Matrix movies, all of which brilliantly combine techno/punk hard beats and the more expected blockbuster orchestral movie soundtracks.

And that takes me back to the original comment that Burnett said that got me thinking: All record making, all songwriting, all singing is storytelling.

All of this is storytelling. Even the decadence of mannerist, deauthenticated, depersonalized "artistic product"—reflecting the contemporary attitude that all things are to be commodified and categorized or they are not real—is a particular story that is being told.

All songwriting is storytelling. All myths around art-making are storytelling. I am reminded of what poet Muriel Rukeyser once opined: The universe is not made up of hydrogen, but of stories. Joseph Campbell once defined myths, both religious and cultural, as the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. We are a storytelling species. Story is how we communicate with each other. Stories are how we express our communal and individual values, and also how we talk about what went wrong. Movies are storytelling taken to a synergistic level of words-music-image all combined; even journalistic documentary movies are storytelling. Reporting is storytelling. Even cable TV news is storytelling, although you often have to read between the pixels to uncover the narratives being sold us via assumption and innuendo, which lurk beneath the apparent surface of straight-ahead reporting.

So as someone who has been an artist in multiple media for decades, who now finds himself practicing the synergistic art of songwriting, of words-and-music, I find myself becoming a more conscious storyteller than ever before. That is, more consciously aware of the stories I am telling, and more willing to examine those stories as such. I find myself going back to listen to the folk music I explored deeply in an earlier period of life: the roots music, centuries old, that is being remade and reborn now. For Heartlands I wrote a few new folk songs, inspired by the old roots, but brand new. That sensibility, central as it is to living life in the Midwestern Heartlands, is a thread that winds throughout the music, sometimes more overtly, sometimes more deeply buried. And the work overall is storytelling: telling the stories of what it's like to grow up and live as a gay man in the Midwestern Heartlands, which was the origin and purpose of the music being commissioned.

I am now writing new songs. I find myself connecting to the roots Americana musical revival, not because I play an instrument like mandolin (I don't), or because I'm listening to a lot of Americana albums right now (ranging from Alison Krauss to Edgar Meyers' "Appalachia" series to the many artists influenced by Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and so on), but rather because I find myself writing story-songs. Probably half of the songs lyrics I've written in the early months of 2012 have been impressionistic, based on things and seen while traveling out West, but the other half have been human stories, based on stories I've witnessed, or read about, or which emerged from my own life. What you observe and what you experience, and what you think about all that, that's all fodder for your art.

This is how we re-authenticate our lives, and re-personalize the world. Storytelling is still myth-making, which is how we make a home in the world, and how we make sense of the world and what it offers us, both soft and hard. Myth is the quest for meaning. Storytelling is the very fabric of the weaving of myth.

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

Ignore Art HIstory and Just Make Art

(Hat tip to Robert Archambeau for finding some source materials here.)

I have two artist friends, one of whom just finished art school a couple of years ago, and one who was so traumatized by her post-art school career some decades ago that she effectively stopped making art until her recent artistic renaissance. Both of these are incredibly talented artists; both of them have made pieces of art unlike what you've seen before. Both of them have come under attack, in art school and later in gallery showings, for being out of step with their times and the artistic fashions. Both of them make sincere, unironic art, art that has meaning and beauty, art that speaks to the audience (if not to the critic), and has spiritual content. (Not overt religious symbolism, which I know is what you first thought of when I said "spiritual content," rather archetypal, deeply psycho-spiritual imagery.)

In an interview with poetry editor Micah Robbins, Daniel Nester makes a point or two that I find brilliant:

Nester: I’d like to run it up the pole here for you and see what you think, and I am sure I am wrong, because I usually am and I’m, like old now—is that we have reached a period of late style, where the already bankrupt aesthetic battles of yore—lyric versus narrative, Ron Silliman’s Post-Avant versus School of Quietude, subjective versus written-for-the-ages—have all been decided on. We’re all to be lyric, subjective, post-avant poets now, and that’s that. Baudelaire used the term “Rococo Romanticism,” and I think American Poetry has entered its Big Hair Phase.

Robbins: I find this both depressing and hilarious! And I don’t disagree with your assessment. I’m imagining Charles Bernstein, Kenny Goldsmith, Christian Bök, and Ron Silliman in leopard print spandex and frilly boas dancing around to “Rock You Like A Hurricane”! Ahhhhh. No! Someone make them stop!

OK. So what do we do about it?

I can’t pretend to have a simple answer, but I can say that I don’t think US poetry ever enters any stage without the calculated and concerted efforts of various individuals with very specific interests in mind. The 21st century scene seems to be dictated from above by a rather small group of poets with institutional (i.e., financial) connections that are constantly protected by a weirdly bureaucratic fiat (i.e., MFA dogma). The result is that contemporary US poetry has become, perhaps more than ever, part of the ideological state apparatus. It’s really no surprise that the gross capitulation to those approaches that you identify as having been ‘decided on’ has quite literally sucked the vitality out of contemporary poetry. It has also contributed to a proliferation of journals that fall neatly in line with the status quo. And this—the disturbing obedience of editors to what’s been ‘decided on’—is not only bland, but it’s frightening in its conservatism.

On one level I think the phrase "American Poetry has entered its Big Hair Phase" is one of the funniest assessments of PoetryWorld that I've encountered in a long time. Also one of the most accurate. One a more serious level, Nester's description serves as a scathing attack on the current state of affairs; and Robbins' reply explains why some poets have become disenchanted with the MFA writing programs that have proliferated all across the land (even as they participate).

I've been writing for over a year now on how mannerist art has become, while noting also that some of the same problems exist in contemporary music. This has been occupying my thinking about postmodernism and the arts for some time now.

That it's been "decided on" by the artistic mandarins that we are all supposed to be lyric, subjective, ironic, post-avant-garde poets and/or artists now makes me think of my two artist friends. That they were rejected by the artistic taste-makers and establishment mandarins seems to me exactly parallel to the state of affairs described by Nester and Robbins. Both of them ran afoul of critiques by other artists—I repeat, because this is important, critiques by other artists—precisely because their artworks were epic rather than lyric, archetypal rather than subjective, sincere rather than ironic, and influenced by art-historical iconography without being shallowly postmodern about their sources. My younger friend constantly felt attacked during critique sessions while in art school, because he was making art unlike anyone else, and he wasn't afraid of expressing darker emotions. My older friend, after her art school experience two decades ago, while she was starting to make a career of her art after art school, ran afoul of very similar critiques, and rejection after rejection from shows and galleries.

I've been through that rejection, too. For myself, I am quite aware that the art I make, and the music, and poetry, is the opposite of lyric, ironic, post-avant. It can be subjective art, but mostly in the sense that I approach the universal through the personal. My goal as an artist is not the "self-expression" of ego-display or the cult of celebrity, my goal is transcendence, getting past my "little self" to find the archetypal Self, which is mythic, shamanic, universal. A lot of my art actively scares people, or causes approach/avoidance behaviors, not because the art is shocking (intentionally or otherwise) or depicts brutality, but because it strips away shiny self-reflective filters of denial to deal with the big issues of life and death.

Over the past few years, as I've dealt with a chronic illness, had a few near-death experiences, and undergone life-changing surgery, my art has become even more focused on the big issues of life and death. In other words, as my life has been pared down to its essentials, its core questions, stripping away all unnecessary artifice and detail, so too has my art. I find that I don't care anymore if my art scares people, because I just don't have time or energy to waste on worrying about what people think of me. I've faced my own mortality, and I know my time here is limited, and I know too that I still have a lot I want to get done.

The younger of my two artist friends said to me, when he was still in art school, "You might as well admit it, the art you make is shamanic." He stopped me in my tracks, then, because I had been flailing for a way to market my art that was avoiding sincere words like "shamanic" or "visionary" or "archetypal," for fear of continuing to drive away the public and the critics alike. I had been using "visionary" as the most neutral possible term—but after my young artist friend called me on it, I made a new business card that openly said "Shamanic Artwork" on one side, with this image on the reverse:



It has in fact been a very popular business card. It might not be ironic or reserved enough for the mandarins of late-stage mannerist art, but the general public seems to love it.

So, where does this leave us?

In talking with both of my artist friends, the older trying to restart a career now that she's gotten past a lot of trauma she'd gone through back then, the younger having just survived the rigors of art school, I've found myself saying to both of them: Let all that stuff go. Let go of all the judgments and theories and -isms that were thrown at you, let go of all the career expectations they wanted to prepare you for, expectations which skew the critical judgments made in school and after. Just empty you mind and make art.

Ignore your history, ignore art history, ignore the mandarins and just make art.

That's my best advice to any artist, writer, or composer. I do my best to practice what I preach. I find it liberating to encounter the blank page with no expectations or history, beginning as if for the first time every time. In Zen, they call this practice "beginner's mind," which is fluid and open and playful, as opposed to expert's mind, which has become inflexible because it thinks it already knows all the answers. The state of affairs that Nester describes, the late stage of poetry, where the ossified are in charge of teaching, to paraphrase Robbins, is very much an example of expert's mind.

In expert's mind, what poetry is has been already "decided on." There are things you do, and that is Poetry, and things you don't do, and that is not-Poetry. I've run afoul of that myself, in a telling moment when a neo-formalist poet objected to a poem of mine on essentially moral grounds. Mind you, not on literary grounds, but on ideological ones. This is another example of expert's mind in operation, but also reflects on the aspect of postmodern Mannerism that focuses on means rather than ends.

So, again, I say that the answer is very simple and plain: Just make art. No matter what, make art. Don't stop. Make art. Don't get tied up in knots by expectations. Ignore the worst baggage of history. Just make art.

•

Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard. There is no universal Poetry, anyway, only poetries and poetics, and the streaming, intertwining histories to which they belong. There is room, indeed necessity, for both Neruda and César Valléjo, for Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alfonsina Storni, for both Ezra Pound and Nelly Sachs. Poetries are no more pure and simple than human histories are pure and simple. And there are colonised poetics and resilient poetics, transmissions across frontiers not easily traced.
—Adrienne Rich

Poetry is just something you have to do, all the time. It's a wide and varied artform, and like many other wide and varied artforms it can accomodate a wide range of tastes and audiences. Don't limit it. Just do it.

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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Previous entries in this series:

Literary-Critical Thoughts at Semi-Random

Literary-Critical Thoughts at Semi-Random 2

The New Piano Music

I have always been more of a composer than performer. I was able, during my pianist career, which began at age 6 and lasted into college, to perform competently. But my emphasis was never on Playing The Classics, or being a Great Performer.

When I was in music school, there was often a gap between the performance majors and the composers. Many of the composers were also gifted performers, on a wide range of instruments. But the performance majors didn't compose—except for exercises in theory classes, which were usually about writing in the style of tonal music from the 18th or 19th centuries. I wrote my own share of learning-pieces in theory classes, including faux-Bach, faux-Mozart, faux-Debussy, faux-Stravinsky pieces. Those are all études, meant to learn something from doing, but not in themselves to be considered as actual music. Musical, but not music. Some of this is a matter of intent, of course.

But the main gap between the composers and the performance majors was a simple emphasis. It can be defined, crudely, as the difference between creation and re-creation.

Performance majors I knew, many of them gifted and remarkable talents, did not usually consider themselves as creative. I disagree. I reframe that to say that their creative efforts went into interpreting the masters, into re-creating existing compositions. Most performance majors when I went to music school were not improvisers: jazz classes were not part of the curriculum at that time. Some few performers were improvisers, but it was because they loved to play jazz, and picked up gigs outside of school. This has changed now, as there are many music school that include jazz and even rock in their curricula. It's not just classical music anymore in music school.

Performing, or re-creating a composer's intent in the printed score, is not a matter simply of playing the notes. Performance requires interpretation. Matters of tempo, phrasing, pauses, subtle variations in feeling—these are all aspects of interpretation. If performing music were only a matter of mechanical re-creation, then anybody could do it and it would always sound good. But there's a reason Artur Rubinstein was beloved for his Chopin interpretations: they carried the heart and soul of the music, not just the notes.

So I view interpretation as a species of creativity. It's not obvious, and it's not overt, and many classical performers would quibble with me. Nonetheless, since I view creativity as an infinite resource in all aspects of life, I find it here as well.

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I have mixed feelings about recorded music.

One or two great composers of the twentieth century opined that recorded music was lifeless next to going to a concert. John Cage told a story in which he was at a concert of Beethoven symphonies. A little boy sitting in front of him objected to his parents, "But that's not the way it's supposed to go! It's not like on the record!" This is amusing, but it also speaks to idea that recorded music conditions our ears with expectations that are often not met in live performance. We get used to a certain glossy perfection. Glenn Gould, the perfectionist pianist, used the recording studio to create perfected performances of Bach that even he could not perform live. Recordings of John Cage pieces fix in place a single performance of music that is meant to be ever-changing, never performed exactly the same way twice, and open to chance.

Nonetheless I treasure my collection of recordings of Cage's music.

I am in fact a highly experienced and qualified recording engineer. I know my way around the tools of the recording studio. I did a lot of tape music during and after college. I know how to splice using a razorblade (and believe you me, digital editing is a major improvement on the old tools). I have actually used reel to reel tape to master recordings of my tape pieces and performed compositions. (Most of these I have already transferred to digital media, or am in the process of transferring.) I still work occasionally in a recording studio, and I have a computer-based recording studio in my spare room at home.

We always work with the best tools we have available. When better tools are developed, musicians on the leading edge always migrate towards using them.

And yet there is nothing like a live performance.

In a live performance, you often hear the musicians breathing—and breath is an essential element of interpretation. When you hear a string quartet breathing as one right before and after a difficult ensemble passage, you are given audible evidence of the kind of unitary empathy that chamber music creates alike in performers and audience. Breath is life. Breath is timing. Breath is what connects us all. The masters of meditation speak of the breath in the same way that the masters of music performance do: it is what gives us life, and the discipline of mastering the breath is what gives us the ability to go beyond our own limits.

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Musicians who are dominantly performers are specialists. They train as hard as doctors or lawyers, often for many more hours, many more years. They often have the physical tone of trained athletes, as well, as playing a musical instrument is a somatic experience, not a purely aural or mental one. I know brass players (french horn, trumpet, etc.) who could probably do push-ups with their lips.

When I was a boy, I had severe respiratory illnesses many times; I even ended up with bronchitis in the hospital at age 11, in an oxygen tent, sleeping sitting up so I wouldn't drown in my own pneumonia. Singing in choirs and learning to play flutes, over the next dozen or so years, were what gave me my breath back. I still am prone to respiratory illness, I get them more easily than most; but I have a discipline of breathing that helps me get through, now, thanks to music. Meditating for many years also helped.

A trained musical performer is a highly skilled person. They have to be able to do several things at the same time. They must coordinate physical exertions and muscle memory with hearing, cognition, and reading and memorizing specialized notation.

I sing in a men's chorus right now in which I am one of the most highly trained musicians; some of the men don't even read music notation well, but learn by ear and by listening to their compatriots. The result is a good choral group with a good choral sound. We all come from different skill levels in music. I occasionally forget this, and get a blank stare when I start talking theory.

The problem is that these highly-trained, incredibly talented, strongly motivated people often can't earn a living doing what they love doing best: playing music. We live in a culture that devalues all things artistic, because they are not obviously profit-motivated or economically-oriented. But music is a gift we couldn't live without. A healthy musical culture is one mark of the health of a civilization.

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We do live right now in an artistically decadent, mannerist culture. We live in a culture where there is a severe disconnect between popular forms of entertainment, and forms of making fine art that have become insular and mannerist. Your average listener doesn't care about new music—except that commercial pop music is driven by novelty, by the cult of personality and celebrity, and by the profit motive. It's a contradiction: most listeners refuse to listen to music by living composers—unless they're pop music songwriters.

"New music" is something most listeners avoid.

That's too bad.

There are some neo-romantic composers out there writing new music that is very conventional, very unsurprising, very easy on the ears, not hard to follow, full of good hummable tunes and melodies, and full of memorable moments. Some of these composers are popular Broadway composers, with strings of successful hit shows and hit songs. Let's face it, though: Broadway as an industry is highly romantic. It caters, sometimes panders, to the common denominator. It borrows a lot from literature. It can be tremendous fun. But it's not very challenging. Broadway musicals rarely ask you to change your life. If they inspire you to do so, it's because you yourself have found a resonance point between you and the Broadway musical.

Of course music can change your life.

But any music can change your life. The danger lies in thinking that some kinds of music cannot, simply because you are not immediately attracted to them, or they don't speak to you. Yet music that is too challenging is no longer entertainment. What provokes, provokes life.

But entertainment isn't about life: it's about simulations of life. Rob Breszny's band World Entertainment War formulates this as the slogan: Performance is life. Entertainment is death. Entertainment is a passive re-creation of sentimental nostalgia for the genuinely-lived life. Because entertainment is passive, exercise-less and inactive, it doesn't feed the mind and body, it deadens them. The land of the entertained couch potato is the realm of the already-dead.

Commercial pop is not new music: it's recycled, dead music. It may be marketed as fresh and new, but compare to last year's novelties, and you see it's just more of the same. Nothing has really changed. The essence of mannerist entertainment is that it contains no new ideas, only the deadly repetition of old ones. What appears to be innovation is only variation of what has gone before. A new "reality TV" show is like every other one already in existence; content doesn't matter, only format and presentation. Nothing is more unreal than "reality TV."

Mannerist entertainment such as commercial pop music, because it is driven by market economics rather than by any creative force of innovation, keeps recycling the same tropes. They are presented as fresh each news cycle, but with rare exceptions they are simply remixes of what has already been known to sell well. Commercial pop music as a business is inherently conservative. It has no real desire to nurture innovation or exploration, because it's main goal is to sell the music. Experimentation always risks being unpopular and not selling. What music industry corporation would truly want to risk that? The recording companies that do push the envelope artistically are in the minority.

New music can push against conservative recycling and mannerism. You have to let it, though. You have to be open enough to its possibilities, even to its baffling complexities which may seem obscure and incomprehensible at first. New music often requires you to stick with it, to get to eventual rewards. There is always a risk that the time you invest in educating yourself about new music might not pay off. So if you're content with what you already know you like, why bother seeking out the new? Most listeners don't.

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My own new music has been called dissonant and difficult. It's actually not that dissonant; it's just that it's not regressive neo-romantic ear-candy with easy predictable chords and pretty melodies. I do like to use more complex and interesting musical ideas in my new music, because when I write I'm also writing for myself. Yet I am capable of writing to commission in the style the client wants. And a large part of my new music is accessible even to new listeners, even though it is based on modal and non-Western styles. I can "write pretty." I just don't all the time.

My music is not atonal, as I don't write serial compositions. I actually have no use for classic serial twelve-tone technique, which I regard as an artistic dead-end. As such, it is quite parallel to contemporary mannerist poetry that is all about manipulating the materials in a context free of meaning. If all notes have equal value, if all words have equal value, then none do. The lowest common denominator of pre-packaged pop music and the extremes of ivory-tower academic classical music have this in common: they're both about nothing. They may be sensational, but the triumph of mannerism is the triumph of style over substance.

It ceaselessly amazes me how poorly this is understood: style can never replace substance, where there is none.

Style in a vacuum is a dead-end. Style exists to reveal substance, it cannot stand on its own. As fond as I am of sweet desserts, you can't live on them. Pre-packaged, over-produced, synthetically-performed pop music is all style; it has no heart. You can make it into the soundtrack of your life, if you choose, but what kind of life is that? A default life. A life lived vicariously. The cult of celebrity and the packaging of popular entertainment are closely linked in form and in practice: both are entertainment, neither are about you living your own life. You end up living someone else's life, never your own. Or you live your life For another, rather than for yourself.

Advertising is all lies.

It creates needs that don't exist. American advertising, compared to European advertising, is heavily fear-mongering. Fear of germs, fear of bad breath, fear of disease and mortality, fear of not being cool, fear of not fitting in at your workplace—these are all the tools of advertising. And they are also the tools of political campaigns, which are actually marketing campaigns. Campaign ads are often designed to make you afraid to vote for the other guy. And campaign ads lie as often as do commercial product ads.

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Whatever you think you know about new music, whatever brief encounter you might have had with a piece of new music that soured your taste for all new music, whatever belief you have that composers don't care about their audiences: you're wrong.

The problem is, composers like other artists are always fighting an uphill battle. Against ignorance, against willful miseducation, against the idea that high culture and low pop culture can never meet and have nothing to say to each other. There has always been a strain of virulent anti-intellectualism in American culture, especially in political discourse, and when it comes near the arts it tends to be proud of its ignorance and lack of understanding. Why else would politicians attack something they don't really understand? Of course, politics too is entertainment, more style than substance. Mark Twain said that a century ago, and nothing has substantially changed.

in new music, there are two urges a composer must balance: The urge to write whatever they want, whatever they hear inside that they want to make happen, the urge to explore a direction in the music as far as can take them; and, the urge to have an audience, the desire to be heard, the desire to have musical ensembles actually perform your music.

It's one thing for write only for yourself, or your own band, or to do solo work in a recording studio, where you play all the parts and the music is all your own. It's another thing to be commissioned to write a large scale new work for an orchestra or other performing ensemble. You have to balance those urges.

Mostly I write whatever the hell I want. BUt here's the paradox: Almost all of my composed chamber music, in which I wrote whatever the hell I wanted to write, were commissions. They were for the most part commissions by performers who wanted me to write for them. In most cases, they had heard my other new music, liked what they heard, and asked me to write a piece for them.

I got all the way through music school, writing several new pieces a year, and only two of those were not commissions. (I don't count the études and other little throwaway pieces, many of which were exercises rather than finished works.) I occasionally stumbled. one or two pieces I wish I could rewrite now, and one I have in fact revised. But every piece I composed at that time in my life got performed, sometimes more than once. I have recorded performances of most of them.

Now I find myself with a piano again, wanting to compose again, wanting to sit down and notate again. I'm submitting my existing compositions to contests to by chosen for commissions for new works. (An occasionally dismaying process.) I'm writing new piano music, and choral music. I want to write more.

Here's the hinge of the balance: I write new music because I want to, because I can, because I must. It is as essential to me as breathing. It's great when other people like it, too. And it's okay when they don't.

If you don't like new music, you don't know what you're missing. And if you give it a try and still don't like it, you can always go back to that other stuff.