Culture and location: pros and cons

[Lizzie]

Came across this today:

"'In Europe,' Pablo Neruda said, 'everything has been painted.' He meant that Europe is an old culture, with the implication that Europeans may be tempted to describe their experience in terms of everything that's gone before and could perhaps fall into cliche as a consequence. When you sit down to write a love-poem all the love poems you've ever read will echo in your head. How can you find something new to say about jealousy, loneliness or grief -- the universal emotions -- when Shakespeare, Goethe and Ronsard have been there before you? Neruda might not have considered himself to be hamstrung by tradition, but even for a new world poet the absence of European cultural history doesn't necessarily confer an invulnerability to to cliche. Whatever part of the glove you happen to occupy, our response to Neruda's remark would be: if everything's already been painted, we'll have to find new ways to paint it again."   

~Matthew Sweeney

It seems to me that a legacy of writing like Europeans have would benefit one's own writing through (potentially) more exposure to great writers, yet I see what he's saying that it could be harder to carve out your own niche when you feel like everything's already been done.

I will say that as I've been trying to get iambic pentameter under my belt, I've gotten the urge to use more antiquated words that I would never think to use in a free write; I believe that the reason is that I've heard those words used in that meter before. So, they just come to mind. It's not fatal, but it is annoying.

So, anyways, I'm curious to explore this idea of how one's culture/location hinders or helps writing.

[Quixilated]

I don't think this is answering your actual question about culture.  But as to the "everything has already been done" ... I liked his answer "we'll have to find new ways to paint it again," it's so positive.   It reminds me of something a friend said to me when I was moaning about that very same thing.  She said, "Maybe it's all been said before, but it's never been said by you."  

And as for the culture discussion. I know that the way I think and the way I phrase things is directly a result of the combined factors of books I've read and my mother's strange and sprawling but enthusiastic way of exclaiming over everything.  I can actually hear the echo of their influence when I write, could almost point to the place on the page "I said that like my mother ... I used that word or thought because of Bronte or Dickens ..."  I know that's not exactly the "culture" you mean, but my world is very small.  Even so, I don't know where my own voice ends and the echo begins.   Probably still didn't answer your question ... sorry.  Blarg.

I think what I'm trying to say is that I don't think it's a matter of "hinder" or "help" so much as culture is one of the threads of your voice, you can't really change it. You can add to it if you want different colors in your tapestry, or to make a different picture, but you can't pull out the threads once they're there without pulling the whole thing to pieces. It is what it is. Your culture from country all the way down to weird family members, are woven into your speech and writing patterns and habits for better or worse. They make you unique, they give you the very thing that will help you NOT be the next cliche. I love the old ways of Europe. I would climb inside a British cup of tea and live there if i could. But if everyone in the world sounded exactly like William Shakespeare, as unfathomably perfect as he was ... well, it wouldn't be good. I sound like me, and you sound like you, and that's your fingerprint in words, unique in all the world.

Anyway. I still don't think I answered the question. But ... that's all I've got.

[just mercedes]

I don't think location is any longer a problem, with the internet. I live in New Zealand, but I'm currently enrolled in an online poetry course with the University of Iowa. We're examining ways of portraying mass death, destruction, etc, by reading Walt Whitman's Civil War writings. Nothing could be further from my culture, yet it's easy to be a part of it.

I've written in forms such as ghazal, rubiyat, sonnets, cinquain, haiku, haibun, kyrielle, limerick, pantoum, qasida, quatern, rispetto, rondeau, tanka, slijo, villanelle - all those forms come from a different culture than mine. Oh, Conachlonn too. Terza rima, Sapphic Ode, Rhyme Royale, even a Shanzai, rondel, rime couee, sestina, dizain, Madrigal, ballade, rictameter, aubade, and of course cento. I've left all the English forms out, as I take it they would be considered my 'culture'.

Waiata I didn't include, because I claim Maori as part of my culture.

I don't say I can write in these forms as easily as those poets whose culture that formed them - but each time I learned more about that culture as I studied the different form. In that way I think poetry breaks down barriers between cultures.

[Achebe]

1. Europe is not a particularly old culture. Anything written in English before the Elizabethans is pretty shite. Italian has the oldest of the modern European literatures and even there it's just a thousand years since Dante. Greece and Rome don't count - they were a foreign culture where pederasty was common practice and the gods drank the smoke of roasting bull thigh bones.
2. It is language that limits, not geography. White New World writers belonged to the European tradition, someone writing in Swahili does not. Now of course, white writers can be black or brown or yellow, thanks to rock music, curry, and cheap tickets on China Southern. And Japanese porn.
3. Hollwood has painted everything before. And Coca Cola. Basically, America. And the UK- James Bond, not Hamlet.
4. Saying new things or old things in new ways - Monty Python, Douglas Adams, Ricky Gervais. It's always possible.

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My post above is a bit haphazard from typing on handheld. Will edit later.

[Lizzie]

2. It is language that limits, not geography. White New World writers belonged to the European tradition, someone writing in Swahili does not.

Hmmmm, this is an interesting point. I have to think some more, but I'm not sure that someone born and raised in London, Dublin, etc. doesn't have some kind of advantage over a white English speaker of European decent that lives in, say, Nunavut, Canada. Some places are going to have better access to publishers, writing groups, etc. than others, but I don't know the business well enough to speak definitively. Growing up somewhere off the beaten path could potentially confer benefits in terms of having a very unique voice that hasn't been done before (to the point of the quote above), but I think there is also a potential disadvantage to being from a geographical area that not as many people can relate to. And, I think in poetry, a lot of times, we want to see ourselves and our experiences reflected.