12/14/2021
I am not good at representing myself and my output as a writer, in part because it is so voluminous. Everything I write is equally my child. If I have written a poem over six pages, odds are I have shed some tears over it. And I will always pick the wrong poem to submit. This is a phenomenon my girlfriend has noticed. I somehow get infatuated with cleverness over raw emotion and the poems I choose to submit to contests, or publications, or blogs, are usually byzantine and a slog. When she picks out a poem for me to submit, it’s something more focused on the image and also something more emotionally resonant. So, I rely on her judgment more than my own. I have one thing I want to do, and my hands make another thing, and the person reading it makes something else, with their brain. It is a relentless making. I wouldn’t have any patience for it besides that it is the only thing I can do with some success.
Not that I shouldn’t learn what works of mine best represent me as a writer, only that my conception of them differs from that of the general public. I think the art of writing, or really any art, is about communicating something. So then, I always assume a kind of discontinuity between what is in my brain and what gets on the page, and in a larger way how an audience may ‘misread’ those intentions.
Misreading works of writing is inevitable, but misreading them in the most original way is valuable. Harold Bloom called it ‘misprision,’ an archaic word meaning to conceal one’s knowledge of a crime, but which Bloom uses in Shakespeare’s context of ‘misjudgment’ from Sonnet 87. The crime of language, of course, is that language is already an interpretation in its very utility to us. It represents but is no essentia. It does not exist ‘just because’ but was created to serve a purpose. This is why we might say a landscape is beautiful, but not artful. There is not artifice involved.
I think I could say that all this waxing about the fluidity of language is a defense for why I cannot figure out what kind of poems to submit. What I think is good often is not what others think is good. Maybe I could say that I am ahead of my time, that people are still catching up to what I am trying to say. But how does that serve me? It makes me feel complacent. If I can avoid a plateau, even by changing my praxis meaninglessly and uselessly, then I will always be challenging myself. I think language is in fact the 4th dimension, not time. Animals are doomed to a life that is entirely a guessing game and instinctual, outside of the possibility that animals possess a psychic 6th sense, which I won’t get into. The point is, people can actually elaborate on their purposes with language. The difference in realities between animal and humanity is enough to constitute a separate dimension, to me; that is, something wholly available to one dimension that is closed off entirely by the dimension below. Maybe I am putting too much value in language, but after all I am a word nerd.
However, I think the reason I can’t pick out good poems really has to do with the idea of communication. Communication is a synthesis of two parties’ understanding of things. I meet the audience halfway. That is something I have mused upon in this class a lot and I have tried to put myself in the shoes of the person reading me.
I believe that is what it means to take advice. Taking advice is a tacit acceptance of a perspective outside of one’s own. Because advice is given with the purpose of aiding an individual, one can assume it comes from an honest place. This excludes any condescending pep talks one might have received from jocks in high school who just wanted to get a minute alone with you. But anyway, if I am too obsessed with the organic praxis behind my writing, I will forget that editing has a job to do. The voice is better when another voice can tell it how to be itself.
There are things I do not know, because I have not been exposed to the “arena in which these intestine wars are waged.” á la Kant’s statement on metaphysics. I am not exposed. I do not know how the wars of representation in the art world are waged. I am coming at it blindly. In some ways, this is exhilarating. But I have to remember that I don’t know everything. Thinking you know everything is complacent. There is more than an entire literary world out there that I have not yet discovered, and this class made me realize that, too. I think the two greatest lessons from this class go hand–in-hand, for me: 1) Take professional advice always; and 2) F**k with the vision that is yours.
This gives me an appreciation for the benefit of the doubt. If there is one thing in this life I rarely have received, it is the benefit of the doubt. In the words of Quasimoto aka Madlib, “No matter what I do, I’m labeled as a bad character.”
Regarding accepting advice, there is accepting it but also implementing it. Even when I had worked on pieces with writing mentors before, it took a while to feel like I could truly murder my lovelies. I have to. Why? Because art is communication. Outsider art may also communicate but that is not the reason it exists. Outsider art is harrowing and vibrant. Heironymus Bosch, William Blake, me.
I’ve been writing on my own since I was 15. When I was that age, I was living a horrid life of constant physical and emotional abuse from bullies while attending boarding school. It was a sort of last bastion, being that I literally lived and slept in the same dorm as my tormentors.
Other things happened and more dominos fell. Fast-forward to me at Pratt at 32, I am leaving behind a trail of psychic devastation, as if a nocturnal tornado had made all my life before so much waste.
But that is the problem. It wasn’t a waste. Besides the innumerable scattered attempts that have died, I composed and refined hundreds and hundreds of pieces adding up to thousands of pages- long form poetry, essays, genre-bending s**t. You name it. Because it was my last bastion. It was all I did, every day, for over a decade. I had nothing else. Through jails, institutions, but not death, I met Virgil, and then Cerberus, and am palming the rocks of Purgatory now, onward to find Beatrice.
But Beatrice is something without a name. It is something that is a sweet failure, just as Dante’s Pilgrim cannot adequately conceive of the glory of God, though he beholds pure divinity unfolding before his eyes. I should think that idealizing anything would get you nowhere, and this class has only affirmed that success is relative. The ideal is manifested in your brain and nowhere else; you write it down, and f**k, it’s something else. We never know how our writing will be received ultimately. So I should remember that but also remember my outsider roots because I do this for no other reason than to consummate a vision formulated in my head long ago, after putting in my 20,000 hours and realizing that’s not what makes a master. I did this because I had nothing else.
But you can see how, considering the intensity of all this, I might have tended to argue for ‘the spontaneous purity of composition’ if someone gave me advice on my writing. Being at Pratt in all respects has made me pay more attention to advice. Other perspectives exist. My directive to myself for the future would be: learn how to pick out your own pieces for submission. If I am in closer contact with the wisdom that other people have to offer, I know my writing will be richer. So I can rhapsodize about my bohemian poet lifestyle and write all this s**t and passion and drive and whatnot but I think at the end of the day I want to be more than an outsider poet. I want to communicate something of value to other people. That means meeting the audience halfway. That means, other people at Pratt might have as crazy insane a history as I do.
