Tag: poetry

The creative process must not be transcendental.

During a conversation with an emotionally intense and literarily prolific friend earlier this evening, the friend said many of the greatest poets had led doomed lives; doomed in the sense that they’d all suffered great misfortune – emotionally at least – and sorrow and loss. There were enough examples, too: Plath, Woolf, Hughes, Hemingway, Sexton, Haggard, going so far back as Lucanus himself. On second thought, that’s not really surprising because the greatest writers, in my opinion, are simply the greatest articulators of the human condition, however jaded or otherwise.

However, this friend also said that those poets had been recklessly extravagant with their emotional investments on purpose. That they’d deliberately led lives of misery, and that that’s where they drew their literary inspiration from. This seems an awfully distressing proposition: That you’d have to give up the right to live happily in order to be a great poet. The other problem I have with it is if a poet’s living tragic times and then writing great poetry, then the poet is simply a creative chronicler, not a poet at all.

It was a difference of opinion that the friend and I couldn’t reconcile over. While poetry may be one of the greatest forms of human expression, its pinnacle cannot be founded on human misery. Its production cannot be honed at the price of happiness… can it? I understand that these are hollow questions to ask because I’m not going to get an answer to them anytime soon (More importantly, I don’t know any poets to ask what I think must be these intimate questions).

However, to think one has expressed oneself well not by displaying commendable prowess with the tool of expression (i.e., language), not by displaying tremendous insight into the human condition and its trappings, but simply by forcing oneself to live through what I can only describe as emotional trauma is experiential writing at best, historiography at worst. It’s a convenient route through which one accumulates pain to the point of forcing it to transcend one’s existence. I would imagine poetry – or any other art form for that matter – requires effort toward its creation, not simply suffering and then release. There must be room for the aesthete, too.

I’m not securing a case for ‘ars gratia artis‘ either because I’m not discussing the utilitarian or moral function of art, which is the product. I’m simply hoping to establish that the creative process must not be transcendental, while even the product may be. In other words, art has to be humanist – constituted by human agency – in order to be art (Also, my friend, I think Plath would be really disappointed if you’re suggesting she intended to kill herself to be a good poet).

The common tragedy

I have never been able to fathom poetry. Not because it’s unensnarable—which it annoyingly is—but because it never seems to touch upon that all-encompassing nerve of human endeavour supposedly running through our blood, transcending cultures and time and space. Is there a common trouble that we all share? Is there a common tragedy that is not death that we all quietly await that so many claim is described by poetry?

I, for one, think that that thread of shared memory is lost, forever leaving the feeble grasp of our comprehension. In fact, I believe that there is more to be shared, more to be found that will speak to the mind’s innermost voices, in a lonely moment of self-doubting. Away from a larger freedom, a “shared freedom”, we now reside in a larger prison, an invisible cell that assumes various shapes and sizes.

Sometimes, it’s in your throat, blocking your words from surfacing. Sometimes, it has your skull in a death-grip, suffocating all thoughts. Sometimes, it holds your feet to the ground and keeps you from flying, or sticks your fingers in your ears and never lets you hear what you might want to hear. Sometimes, it’s a cock in a cunt, a blade against your nerves, a catch on your side, a tapeworm in your intestines, or that cold sensation that kills wet dreams.

Today, now, this moment, the smallest of freedoms, the freedoms that belong to us alone, are what everyone shares, what everyone experiences. It’s simply an individuation of an idea, rather a belief, and the truth of that admission—peppered as it is with much doubt—makes us hold on more tightly to it. And as much as we partake of that individuation, like little gluons that emit gluons, we inspire more to pop into existence.

Within the confines of each small freedom, we live in worlds of our own fashioning. Poetry is, to me, the voice of those worlds. It is the resultant voice, counter-resolved into one expression of will and intention and sensation, that cannot, in turn, be broken down into one man or one woman, but only into whole histories that have bred them. Poetry is, to me, no longer a contiguous spectrum of pandered hormones or a conflict-indulged struggle, but an admission of self-doubt.