A book as dogma

[rowens]

I always write books. The Baudelaire book, the Whitman book, not a collection, but BOOK as FORM. And I always fail, the things I write are the products of frustrated failure. The book seems more and more the goal, and the botched attempts more and more the fruit. And I have a lot of hatred toward what I write, as pale versions of what I set out to write. But this failure is the subject . . . From Poe and Borges, unable to sustain a novelistic or epic narrative to the Artaud fragments and abortions and Kafka rough drafts, and the critical evaluation of Hart Crane's poetry of failure . . . con't under the line, in a few minutes . . .

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Rimbaud wrote a prose poetry of disillusionment, Henry Miller and Bukowski wrote an art of desperation and limitations . . . con't in a some moments . . . having rabid technical difficulties . . .

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Now we have generations studying and celebrating Failures of Intention, Bravado in Insecurity. I can't, it may be a weakness, but I can't celebrate these things. I can, however, celebrate and indulge in and, more importantly, engage in an aesthetic of uncertainty. An atmosphere of mystery nuanced with complexity. . . . Which I assume in the title of this post. I find myself in disparate realms and levels rather than systems and wholes. I find wholes energized by the disparate sections and technical difficulties that essentially energize and rectify our forms. And . . .

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It seems to me that that's what books have always done, reconcile the disparate into form, structure. But currently, there is usually too much strain on the strange formlessness, or too much on conservatie, reactive form, and not the general lyrical value of moving structure on mere happenstance delight in passionate and tense creation. The book as sophisticated, though boundless, imagination.

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conservative, I meant. . . . The edit button won't work . . .

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Great books are still written. But great books aren't as relevant as these fragments and rough estimations that better suit our so-and-so situation. Is there a value difference between these fragments that have their finger on the many pulses of our time and the more classical perfections that some writers are still capable of producing?

[shemthepenman]

"Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge. If it is so disgusting to judge, it is not because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary because what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgment. What expert judgment, in art, could ever bear on the work to come?"
~Deleuze

[rowens]

I admit that I've never wandered far from that slippery line where a 5 year old's poem to his mother and a wolf's footprints in the snow are as powerful as a play by Shakespeare or a short story by Kafka or Chekhov. I think I keep meeting my attractive, too young or old for me muses while slipping around on that line.

[shemthepenman]

I admit that I've never wandered far from that slippery line where a 5 year old's poem to his mother and a wolf's footprints in the snow are as powerful as a play by Shakespeare or a short story by Kafka or Chekhov. I think I keep meeting my attractive, too young or old for me muses while slipping around on that line.

i think in art nowadays, including poetry to a certain degree, the pendulum swing is heavily in the direction of formal perfectionism. that being the case it seems only right to go in the opposite direction. not chaos, per se, but experimentation. it’s time to try to shake up the aesthetic—it’s always someone’s project in any given time period, so why not ours? 
but it’s a difficult thing to do. it’s easier to be a cartographer than an explorer: this way Shakespeare... that way Joyce... and back again—of course, these are not the only directions but are representative of two relative extremes. going off the beaten track is riskier and has unique dangers, like finding yourself not off track at all, but just unwittingly stumbling around on a dreadfully cliche side of the map.

[Mopkins]

poet Les Murray





Religions are poems. They concert
our daylight and dreaming mind, our
emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture

into the only whole thinking: poetry.
Nothing's said till it's dreamed out in words
and nothing's true that figures in words only.

A poem, compared with an arrayed religion,
may be like a soldier's one short marriage night
to die and live by. But that is a small religion.

Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition;
like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete
with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that?

You can't pray a lie, said Huckleberry Finn;
you can't poe one either. It is the same mirror:
mobile, glancing, we call it poetry,

fixed centrally, we call it a religion,
and God is the poetry caught in any religion,
caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror

that he attracted, being in the world as poetry
is in the poem, a law against its closure.
There'll always be religion around while there is poetry

or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent,
as the action of those birds - crested pigeon, rosella parrot -
who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut.

this may be my favorite bit of wisdom on the persistance of poetry and paradise and purgatory, and the reason to invoke the muse and amuse said muse, marvelling at the mystery of the inherited voice of god we all seem to possess, effervescing into bursting blossom, by self-immolating sin every second, and ascending as a consecrated phoenix from the ashes of it's former incarnation, when we finally manage to squeeze our home-brewed dogma into the straight-jacket of religion, with god explored and charted, and documented, with the copyright granted to the only true church and known better to us than the backs of our hands, the palms of which we trace our future path, which we already suspect we know the direction of and have a favorable wind at our backs to reach our self-created paradises to dwell eternally in the the presence of the almighty poet of the cosmos in a recreated eden.

everything is a poem and a religion, poets are shamans and do not mistake themselves for gods or devils in their ritual mirrors, poetry is the mould everything is cast in, though you write not a thing.

[rowens]

It seems to me that James Joyce succeeded in what he set out to do, while some of the people I mentioned succeeded, if they did succeed, despite themselves. They were driven to what they accomplished after failing in the traditional modes. Or maybe it stopped being worth the effort, and they put the effort elsewhere. . . . Besides all that, I wonder about the writer without a book, without a book as the goal, nor other media. The writer as travelling oral salesman.

[shemthepenman]

It seems to me that James Joyce succeeded in what he set out to do, while some of the people I mentioned succeeded, if they did succeed, despite themselves. They were driven to what they accomplished after failing in the traditional modes. Or maybe it stopped being worth the effort, and they put the effort elsewhere. . . . Besides all that, I wonder about the writer without a book, without a book as the goal, nor other media. The writer as travelling oral salesman.

just to be sure, i used Joyce as a example of another place on the map. another way of going about things that is already a well eastablished route. although, it’s actually far more difficult for a writer to follow Joyce’s path than, say, shakespeare’s, it has to be said. people will let you write sonnets all day long, even bad ones... but try a bit of the old stream of consciousness and you’re already against the wall having to justify yourself; and not to mention being crushed under the weight of finnegans wake. it’s as if people only have the patience to give one or two people the benefit of the doubt in any given epoch. it’s the same with painting. photo realism “good”... cubism “bad”. and so on. but this is all waffle really. we write. sometimes we like it. sometimes other people do, too. there is a tendency, though, to hide the process and make everything “mystical”. Bacon used to employ a chap to destroy the paintings he never wanted anyone to see. etc.

about the book thing. back in the day, when the first printing presses were getting fired up, a lot of people worried it would be the death of culture. that memory would erode etc. in reality culture became richer, didn’t it?
i’m not sure what i think about the idea of the traveling troubadour. i like books. and i don’t really like the sound of people reciting poems. is the book the goal, though? i think having a book in mind, at least, tightens one’s focus.

[nibbed]

Are writers still capable of producing classics? Writer's of the classics were given great periods of flow. Moments when words just gushed out and they could hardly write it down fast enough. Many of those moments were then compiled making their great work. Writers today are either too busy or too distracted. We are too programmed (because we are dopamine heads) usually by TV, internet, music, or radio. Life is not as simple as years gone by and length of days is now taken for granted because, well, we live longer.

[rowens]

I was wondering about the hundreds of things that I've already written, many I haven't shown to anyone. Whether I should just let them sit in my trunk of papers or scatter them around while I'm trying to finish these books that are currently more important to me. And I was bringing up, in general, the idea of and discussion on these writers who work an aesthetic out of their limitations and botched attempts. Sometimes it's not them as much as later critics who add levels of understanding, and appreciation, that the writers never considered themselves.

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Writers of the classics were sometimes able to touch on things they didn't even know about. Many writers these days don't even attempt to include the scope of culture or multiculture that's painfully unavoidable for many. This is a response to the response I just now saw.

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I can and do read The Bible as a cohesive, formally structured work, even though I know that it's not.

[Leanne]

I do feel my life has become unreasonably complex now that I'm allowed to vote. Also, being freed from the necessity to bear children until one kills you really does lead irrevocably to hedonism. I believe that if I wanted to I could even marry a black man these days -- not like in the good old days, when women did what they were told and so did those damned Negros. How I long for the simple life!

The "classics" are dominated by the writings of rich white men and the occasional rector's daughter who had the decency not to waste an Oxford education entirely by scribbling it away, but considerately died before menopause rendered her entirely useless. The book as form indeed reflected the zeitgeist of the time -- a time in which the lives of the idle rich were glorified as the ideal, when conquest and domination over the Other was de rigueur, and when true hardship was a handy narrative device but not something one should dwell on as being the business of right-minded folk.

The zeitgeist of today, in a world where borders are intangible and time does not always run in a straight line, does not necessarily have room for perfection. Considering the amount of debate that the classics still generate, it's fair to say that they didn't attain perfection either. I find that preconceived aesthetics are often dull and stale -- a la MFA panel poetry-by-numbers -- and would recommend experiment, error, reflection, correction, subversion and outright rebellion.

And get your kids vaccinated, you dumbasses.

[Leanne]

I was wondering about the hundreds of things that I've already written, many I haven't shown to anyone. Whether I should just let them sit in my trunk of papers or scatter them around while I'm trying to finish these books that are currently more important to me. And I was bringing up, in general, the idea of and discussion on these writers who work an aesthetic out of their limitations and botched attempts. Sometimes it's not them as much as later critics who add levels of understanding, and appreciation, that the writers never considered themselves.

Are they more or less valuable to you if shown to other people? If neither, then no harm is done by showing them. And you are quite correct: you don't know what you've written until someone else reads it and explains it to you. Art is dialogue. Argument. Pissing into the wind and convincing others it's lemonade.

[rowens]

I've already shown hundreds of things to people. The rest are things I go back to sometimes, and reconsider. I know exactly what I should show people and what I shouldn't. But I also know that many people wouldn't agree with me. And there's simply no room anywhere for all the things I've written other than in this bottomless trunk that piles and piles endlessly.

[Leanne]

We all do that -- audit ourselves, and the self we want to present to the world. Most of us, anyway -- some will just plonk whatever shit comes out of their head onto a page and post it on the internet expecting adoration. I'd rather the trunk. Mary Poppins has a good one. You should talk to her.

[rowens]

The more you write, the harder it gets. You've done the same thing over and over and it never seems the last word on the subject, you find more options and have to make more decisions. It doesn't get easier, it only gets harder.

[Leanne]

Yep.

If it gets easier, it's because you're only ever taking the path you've already beaten down. Poetry in particular doesn't generate answers, just a shitload more questions.

Welcome to enlightenment. Collect your fat man statue at the door.

[rowens]

Also, I've never seen the use in trying to write something people will 'like.' If I know that the majority of people will like it, what point is there in writing it?

[Leanne]

If it doesn't offend someone, you haven't written anything worthwhile

[rowens]

People say that the writer must respect the reader, that it's the reader that the work is offered to. But if the work is no good, there will be no readers, no good ones anyway. I'd rather have no readers than compromise in what I do and not do it in exactly the way I want to do it. And that happens sometimes. Often there are no readers. But most of the time there are. And good readers too. But even then I don't trust them.

[Leanne]

Why is trust the important thing? You're lying to them in what you write, because you're manufacturing a reality that you're not even sure exists. They will lie when they read it, because they don't want you to think that they believe what you've written, or that you're more important as a writer than they are as readers. But you can negotiate. You can take the intersections of what you believe, what they believe and what you both want to believe, and build something that nobody believes but people can swallow. That's if you want to be a political success. If you want to be a writer -- if you already are a writer but want to be a writer with more readers -- then let them take it as an enema. That way they get to hit the g-spot on the way in.

[rowens]

One of these days I hope to be one of those beloved writers who doesn't even know that he has readers and would be tormented by meeting one.