I try to never put joy into my poems. Wit, hilarity, amusement, bittersweetness, play, observation of some happiness at a distance - these can all appear. But never joy.
This is not a holdover from some teenage emotional period when all I felt was turbulence. I don't have some black/white conception that all the world is either horrible or wonderful. I do experience joy in my life, generally on a daily basis.
But to transcribe that joy is to limit it. It is to place boundaries around joy and say, "Here is where this has existed, where it can exist. Here is the moment, which I have now codified." I don't want to do that with my happiness. I want it to be blurred and shifting, dangerously/wondrously movable.
So when I write sad poems, or more often for me, poems of mixed and contrasting emotions, what I'm really doing is limiting my sorrow. I'm building a framework within which someone else can place their (preexisting) sadness.
Thoughts from those who write happy poems? Any sad-poem-writers who now have a theoretical framework to justify your productions?
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JESUS OF NAZARETH AND THE FRENCH TURN TO GOD
3 weeks ago
2 comments:
Hi JeFF,
I am hearing what you are saying but not buying it at all. If this is true for any human emotion, and if by writing it down you are limiting it (which I agree with - conveying it in any medium is limiting it, but this does not mean the art is necessarily "bad"), and if in doing so you are feeling the poem's inadequacy or poetry's or art's shortcomings, then you either cease writing and cease creating art due to its being ineffectual, or you try writing and creating more effective work. How much closer to that joy, or rage, or sadness, can you approximate in words, images, sound, etc.
For me, this is why, after writing one book of poems, I have to write another one. And after writing that one, having to write another one again, and so on and on.
Hi Barbara Jane,
I'm glad you're calling me out on this one, because I seem to have portrayed my position poorly.
I'm not saying that art that attempts joy is bad art. And I'm not saying that you can't capture joy in art. I'm saying that as a personal decision, I don't try to push that particular boundary. I try to create more effective work in other areas, in this case not-happy poems, rather than approach the Uncanny Valley of joy. Maybe I'm depriving the world of some hidden joyous poem I could otherwise create, but I'm funneling those energies into something else productive, or so I hope.
I like to move from project to project, much like you having to write more books. I did some very serious postcolonial work in my first chapbook. And I knew immediately that I wouldn't be able to do anything more effective for a number of years, not without a lot more experience. And in fact, I seriously doubt I'll ever top OcSerp when it comes to cultural critique in my own poetry. So rather than tread water, I moved into a new area, particularly spoken word. I'm still finding the boundaries in that, the limits of performance. That is, I still feel like I'm limited as a performer. I think I can get closer yet to the edges of what that format means/can be (and at the same time not achieve that dreaded sensation of something being close but not quite). The dissertation poems are another boundary pusher yet. They'll never be quite right, never what they strive to be, but I'm willing to try and get close with them.
Now that I type all that out, I'm no longer certain if I'm really defending my position or just reiterating it with oppositional examples.
A serious question, since you've offered a serious response: Is there a problem in someone giving up creating a particular type of art and concentrating on others? Or is that a generalization/misrepresentation?
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