The Offices of Poetry
— One of those books I own and will never let go of is Mickey Rourke and the Bluebird of Happiness: A Poet’s Notebooks by W.S. Di Piero. In some ways, it doesn’t look like much, it’s a slim volume, but some of the thoughts it holds have changed me, helped me, opened me up. The style of writing, the form, these too have been useful.
— I’ve quoted from it before at length, but today this:
“The offices of poetry. To use shapely speech to express the radicals of existence in all their ambiguity. To answer idiosyncratically, privately, to a public world given over to falsehood, fake facts, scuzzy rumour, casual murderousness, comedic denials, manic vicious wind tunnel ideologies. To answer palsied language with vital language, plasticity, gaiety of invention and fabulation, over against opportunistic mendacity. If poetry can’t, or chooses not to, reveal what it feels like to live as a sentient being in a perilous enchanted world, then maybe it really is marginal or beside the point.”
— Published in 2017, that could be from yesterday.
— Everywhere you look, enshittification, mediocrity. (For this is what degenAI is). But good poetry is the opposite of that, good art of any sort. I think, and I’ve said this before and should probably just stop, that there is no point in talking about the lousy stuff, but to just give space to great art, great literature etc.
— Still, I’m not going to your event if your poster was made with AI. Evergreen.
— Funnily, I’d been looking for a quotation for a few days. I couldn’t find it online. I knew I myself quoted this somewhere in one of my own books. But I wanted to find the source. I knew Baudelaire had said it. I knew it was in a book somewhere on my shelves. I delved. I flipped through dozens of books. No luck. I gave up. Then idly, one morning, I plucked the Di Piero from my shelf. Flipped through it. Of course.
— This is Baudelaire: “All that falls short of the sublime is useless and reprehensible.” And Di Piero goes on to note that what Baudelaire didn’t know was that what would come next historically was Impressionism. He “would have been appalled by the new attempt to master sensation induced by nature’s momentary appearance, modernism’s recasting of the sublime.”
— But you know, that’s not what’s going on in our time, we’re not on the cusp of some great new thing like Impressionism. Big hairy nope there. I’ve always loved that quotation because it is so unforgiving. It would be cruel but it’s so bold you have to respect it. I feel like everyone should make art and write and sing and make music. The world truly is a better place when more people are creative. But also, artists, writers, must hold themselves to the highest standards, must reach for the sublime, for excellence. Even as, even though, the average person will find it harder to be discerning because of the massive amounts of slop to sift through which dulls the senses.
— All I know is I don’t want a future of mediocrity. Probably neither does Jane Fonda. Have you seen her on the Daily Show where she says, “I think we have to become living ambassadors to an irresistible future where everybody will be seen and respected by their government.”
— Which reminds me of the quotation by Ursula Le Guin, “It’s up to authors to spark the imagination of their readers and to help them envision alternatives to how we live.”
— And all this is still possible. The future has not been written yet, as is oft said in these scuzzy times. (Remember when Nicholas Carr wrote, Is Google Making Us Stupid? and that became such a talked about article? And now it’s, My Students Can’t Read that is making waves. Well, how can you write the future when you can’t even read a 20 page article? I guess that’s the point of making students stupid.
— Lastly, I’ve been reading Kim Echlin’s Tell Others: Storytelling for a World in Turmoil. I loved her book from a while back on the Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart. And this new one will be of interest to anyone who wants to think more about storytelling, censorship, bearing witness.
— “We turn to the books that teach and delight us, that help us to see the world more creatively, and with more agency. We read and ask, How can I best listen? How do I speak? What can I do?” — Kim Echlin
— “We need new words.” “We need a word for the particular fear created by censorship. We are not helpless. Naming wrong and acting on it begins in our daily lives.” — Kim Echlin
— Wishing you all a good week and some time to meet the perilous enchanted world with your own creativity and joyful invention.
