A Manifesto From Minneapolis
fluffy...@prodigy.net
poetry community about art and "aesthetics". I recently wrote this
"manifesto" of my person aesthetic and am anxious to share it with
people. I welcome responses from you at fluffy...@prodigy.net
Why I (Do Not) Write Poetry
I do not write poetry to communicate. If you want to communicate
something to someone, write them a letter, post a manifesto in
laundromats and on telephone poles, or call a talk radio show. More
people will receive your message than read poetry.
I do not write poetry to describe things: a perfect day, a flower, my
grandmother’s warm cookie-baking kitchen. Artists who paint pictures
of flowers end up selling their work out of trucks in a K-Mart
parking. Dancers who act things out are mimes. Other artists have
figured out ways to express their vision without strict description.
You say live in the world, engage it. The world around me is too
cynical for hearts and flowers and pretty little words. They are too
hardened to wars and hatred and have been told for too long that they
are racist, materialistic, and worse. They have already stopped
listening. There are in my world, however, new things, new metaphors,
new forces shaping our understanding that the poets who came before us
could only dream of and could not utter without being thought
ridiculous.
The Surrealists said write from the subconscious. I say to my
audience, read from there, too. There is more to this world than what
your waking mind occupies itself with.
Readers do not need every detail and subtlety told to them. Television
fills in all the blanks, leaving us empty of ourselves, our own
intellects, and our own private thoughts. The counterrevolution will be
televised. And it will be blared from loudspeakers atop light posts
downtown intended to pacify hoodlums. The longer you are kept outside
of your own head by your walkman, your cell phone, and the million
other things trying to fill you up, to fill in all your blanks, the
more estranged from yourself, your god, your hopes and desires, etc.
you will be. By not drawing an exact picture for my readers, I want
them to rediscover how to fill in their own blanks.
When the reader or the audience fills things in for themselves, the
have become engaged in my work, put themselves into it, and THEN and
only then, have I truly communicated with them.
For all of these reasons, I do not write narrative or descriptive
poetry. You will never see a plot in one of my poems. You will see
one or several central thoughts and a flurry of images winding
themselves around those thoughts. Maybe they’ll make no sense to you.
Maybe you’ll scratch your head after you hear them, but hopefully, they
will keep you puzzling.
One more thing I would like to share: my response to someone who has
accused me of being "bougeois" in rejecting work that puts message
before art. (This particular artist writes narrative/epic poetry. He
compared himself to Homer and I replied that in Homer's day, the novel
and the short story had not yet been invented and Homer was not avant-
garde enough to create them himself.) Anyway, here's my response to
that charge:
"I assume your phrase about bougeois accomodationist ideology refers to
my insistence on putting art BEFORE message. I am not saying that
message should be completely obliterated per se, but that the art and
the form have to come first. I have one additional point to make about
what I feel is a false political dichotomy here.
The Soviet Union demanded art in the service of the revolution and it
resulted in Social Realism. I don't think anyone on this planet would
consider Social Realism to be effective or pleasing art. In fact,
artists in Soviet Bloc countries--as well as Nazi Germany--were in
great danger for producing abstract and surrealist-type work and many
struggled for the freedom to create the kind of art they chose to--art
that served a higher aesthetic rather than the propagandist needs of
the state or the "revolution", if you will. It seems to me ironic that
on the other hand, I frequently hear what amounts to basically
Stalinist aesthetics about art and poetry. All of those artists who
died or served time in the gulags and the concentration camps for
creating "degenerate art" would tell you how revolutionary
"abstraction" and surrealist approaches to art can be--including the
poet Robert Desnos, a surrealist poet who died in of typhus in a
concentration camp just days before it was liberated."
Again, I look forward to hearing from others about all of this, to take
this discussion out of my local poetry scene and see how it flies.
Laura Winton
fluffy...@prodigy.net
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Brandon J. Freels
> You say live in the world, engage it. The world around me is too
> cynical for hearts and flowers and pretty little words. They are too
> hardened to wars and hatred and have been told for too long that they
> are racist, materialistic, and worse.
When you use the world "materialistic" are you refering to the idea that all
things are physical or the idea that "people want stuff"?
> The Surrealists said write from the subconscious. I say to my
> audience, read from there, too. There is more to this world than what
> your waking mind occupies itself with.
Actually, in some sense, Breton did advocate "reading" from the subjective.
This is most evident in his book Surrealism and Painting. It hardly reads
like the work of an art critic who shits objectivity.
> One more thing I would like to share: my response to someone who has
> accused me of being "bougeois" in rejecting work that puts message
> before art. [etc]
I've always found art for art's sake rather drab. Yet, simultaneously I find
art with a deliberate political bend [such as Social Realism] to be even
worse. I've always envisioned that within the Surrealist Movement art has
broken away from both of these ties. Art, not for the sake of art or
politics, but for the sake of the free mind. Art for the sake of revelation.
john adams
>
> Things have been getting quite stirred up here in the Minneapolis
> poetry community about art and "aesthetics".
Dale and Barrett, again up to their Laurel and Hardy antics.
> Why I (Do Not) Write Poetry
>
> I do not write poetry to communicate. If you want to communicate
> something to someone, write them a letter, post a manifesto in
> laundromats and on telephone poles, or call a talk radio show. More
> people will receive your message than read poetry.
>
> I do not write poetry to describe things: a perfect day, a flower, my
> grandmother’s warm cookie-baking kitchen. Artists who paint pictures
> of flowers end up selling their work out of trucks in a K-Mart
> parking. Dancers who act things out are mimes. Other artists have
> figured out ways to express their vision without strict description.
>
> You say live in the world, engage it. The world around me is too
> cynical for hearts and flowers and pretty little words. They are too
> hardened to wars and hatred and have been told for too long that they
> are racist, materialistic, and worse. They have already stopped
> listening. There are in my world, however, new things, new metaphors,
> new forces shaping our understanding that the poets who came before us
> could only dream of and could not utter without being thought
> ridiculous.
>
> The Surrealists said write from the subconscious. I say to my
> audience, read from there, too. There is more to this world than what
> your waking mind occupies itself with.
Actually both of these are aspects of surrealism together: the flow of
words written which may serve to displace the normal conscious thought
of the reader through disorientation, "contradiction, discontinuity,
randomness, intractable epistemological uncertainty, and cognitive
estrangement" or 'convulsive beauty'.
john
dale houstman
john adams <gala...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:387FDC0C...@aol.com...
> fluffy...@prodigy.net wrote:
> >
> > Things have been getting quite stirred up here in the Minneapolis
> > poetry community about art and "aesthetics".
>
>
Oh yeah; as Laura no doubt can tell you: we is nothing but high profile!
But if this is true: I wanta be Laurel. He lived longer and was the creative
one...
DMH