Elevating the Public Spirit
One of the first posts on this blog was about writing one’s personal / creative manifesto. At one point I shared a “manifesto for making.” In a post titled, “Uplift” I shared a few more thoughts on how I wanted to be. When I think of manifestos though, I always come back to the famous one by Marina Abramovic, “An Artist’s Life Manifesto.”
There is a great Twitter account that I follow which is “an endless poem called “Love” by Alex Dimitrov. And there is a book, too! Dimitrov came to writing this endless poem under the influence of Marina Abramavic’s directive to “elevate the public spirit.” On writing the poem Dimitrov says in a short piece on Poets & Writers:
“The first line I wrote for what became the title poem of my book Love and Other Poems was, “I love opening a window in a room.” I decided that was the feeling I wanted the poem to evoke. I wanted possibility without abstraction. I wanted the poem to be a space where you could throw everything in, and not feel hopeless about that everything when you were done reading. I was also listening to a lot of The Doors. In one interview I read with Jim Morrison (Sagittarius), he says: “I’d like to do a song or a piece of music that’s just a pure expression of joy, like a celebration of existence, like the coming of spring or the sun rising, just pure unbounded joy. I don’t think we’ve really done that yet.” And so I began my poem with that in mind. It would be a list. A list of things I loved about the world. And maybe, as crazy as it sounded, I wouldn’t stop writing it. Maybe the poem could go on forever (“I am thinking that a poem could go on forever,” Jack Spicer wrote in “Psychoanalysis: An Elegy”). Although I did need to finish, as poems in physical books have to end, I decided I’d continue the poem on Twitter—the place I loathed—one tweet a day, every day, for as long as I was alive.”
So yes the world is on fire, but what if we took it as our task, wrote it into our manifesto, to elevate the public spirit right now? Would that change anything? Would it change us?
Lastly, in the self-promotion department, I just wanted to share some words that the actor Bella Heathcote said about my novel:
As well, I’ll be speaking with the truly delightful Grant Stovel on CKUA Radio, which you can listen to online or on your radio dial this Friday morning at 8:45am MT. Deets here.
And if you live in Edmonton I’ll be at Audreys Books for a socially distanced drop-in kinda book signing this Saturday from 12-2. Our numbers are terrible here right now so this is going to be a super low key affair. You can also phone in or buy online from Audreys and I’m sure they’ll have a way to get the book to you if you’d like a signed copy.
October 6, 2021
