As an editor and writer, I read a lot. Sometimes it’s at ten at night sloughing - or what feels like sloughing - through the inbox, or at ten in the morning riding the eight bus trying to focus on the words instead of the smell of yeast, pee, and crushed dreams. Sometimes I love what I read and sometimes I don’t. Sometimes what I read makes me want to stop writing, sometimes it makes me want to write even more. One thing I can say is that the editor part of me can see when the writer part of me should read more. And the editor part of me can also see when the writer should read more.
As writers, or artists even, we are used to criticism. But sometimes, we try to ignore it so as to further avoid any depression we may be staving off, to avoid any discouragement. Or, sometimes we think we are just SO AWESOME criticism doesn't matter.
One thing that I have noticed as an editor is that the more good literature one reads, the better it influences one’s writing. Congratulations if you aspire to write like Stephanie Meyer or JK Rowling, we all can’t be the Joyce’s of the world. But those who do and can ascend to a higher level (or merit) of literature, should always be interested in the techniques, styles, voice, etc. that will help to better their own writing.
It's never a bad idea to have that one piece, a poem, a story, something to fall back on when you need an extra push toward not feeling like a total lump of shit. I read “Joachim’s Absence” by Pablo Neruda. Here's the first stanza:
From now, like a departure noticed from afar, in funeral stations of smoke or solitary sea walls, from now i see him plunging to his death, and behind him I feel the days of time close in.
If you’ve followed this column through a good part of the seven years
we’ve been publishing it, you know how hooked I am on poems that take a
close look at the ordinary world. Here’s a fine poem by Eamon Grennan,
who lives in New York state, about bees caught up against a closed
window.
Up Against It
It’s the way they cannot understand the window
they buzz and buzz against, the bees that take
a wrong turn at my door and end up thus
in a drift at first of almost idle curiosity,
cruising the room until they find themselves
smack up against it and they cannot fathom how
the air has hardened and the world they know
with their eyes keeps out of reach as, stuck there
with all they want just in front of them, they must
fling their bodies against the one unalterable law
of things—this fact of glass—and can only go on
making the sound that tethers their electric
fury to what’s impossible, feeling the sting in it.
Maybe the question is stupid, but whenever I've been asked something along the lines of, What is creativity? my mind immediately conjures images of children finger painting or throwing glitter at smears of Elmer's glue, making cotton-ball clouds and tapping them in a ziti sky. And maybe, after those images pass, I'll see an image of an art gallery or museum or something. But the childhood images always come first. And while those images don't, in the least bit, answer the question of creativity, childhood is probably a good place to start the discussion (and this essay). This, like most other things, is where creativity is learned. For this short period of time, the only real, intellectual goal for a child is to figure out what exists and what is possible. So, because they are just kids and there are no real consequences to this kind of day dreaming, there are no limits imposed on these experiments, and because of the lack of limits, creativity and imagination, that two-headed dancing beast, can rear their heads and run wild with every insignificant thing it finds.
But despite having my own ideas about creativity, I find myself drawn to the theories of others: hypothesis about what it is/what it means, interviews with artists/writers/chefs about where these ideas come from and the processes that evoke them.
Lately, there have been not a few articles by neurologists of different stripes hoping to nail down exactly what process in the brain cause one, when confronted by a problem, to find a unique and creative way out of the situation. While interesting for purely intellectual reasons, these scientific explanations seem to be little more than a man scratching at bark to find the nature of a tree. It's true, he may very well find something (a bug eating at the wood, for instance), but the essential nature of the tree will remain hidden. It could be that the essential nature of the thing will always remain hidden, is a thing beyond our limited mind, and may not even be a thing that exists, just a word that attempts to stop time, to freeze a moment in the metaphysical lab of the mind, tries to examine the world in order to develop true generalities from a specific. But by the time anything is gleaned from these experiments they have already spoiled and turned false. The moment has irrevocably passed and everything has changed.
Not to brag, but being a pretty famous neurologist in my own right, I have my own conception of what happens in the brains of truly creative people:
To find the spot where creativity happens, you must get past the bogs of last night's binge drinking, past the screens looping, repressed memories from childhood, to the places where the these experiences have swept though and left smoldering piles of rubble. There you will find large swaths of circuitry ruined. Disconnected wires flailing about like loose fire hoses, spraying bits of information in places they have no earthly right to be. There strange piles of images and phrases and ideas combine in large, rank compost heaps. In theses heaps, disparate tidbits collect from years of seeing and hearing, combine into an amalgamation all their own, combine and (if your prayers are said earnestly, and the muse is disposed to smile kindly) come out of that pile of shit looking brand new.
After these strange chemical reactions comes the truly audacious aspect of the creative arts, where what Liz Diller (video above) calls naivete. The element of naivete seems just as important as the creative act itself. Having the naivete to believe that theses strange amalgamations mean something, are important. The naivete to believe that these divergent stimuli can be magnetized and attracted to one another in a way that is interesting, in a way that doesn't just make you look crazy. And, most importantly, having the naivete to believe that the connections, these new amalgamations, will make a sweet enough sound to attract other people, an audience, a public. That people will, and do care to listen, to see, this new world that was just, a moment ago, created from nothing, from everything.
For a bunch more interviews in this vain, by the filmmaker Doug Aitken, click here. I strongly suggest the interview with architect David Adjaye, and, oh, there are also interviews with Beck and Jack White that are quite pleasant as well.
When I was younger, my dad got angry when I called him father. I guess there wasn’t enough devotion in that word. Yet, when he got angry with me for other things, he would call himself ‘father’ with a red face and the veins purpling in his forehead.
John Locke said, “Words in their primary or immediate Signification, stand for nothing, but the Ideas in the Mind that uses them” (the crazy punctuation is not mine). Now there are multiple ways to interpret this and there are scholars who have spent a majority of their lives trying to determine exactly (which is ironic despite his vagueness) what Locke meant. And to fully understand the point that I’m going to make, bare with me over the next four paragraphs…
We may collectively understand a word’s meaning but that act alone doesn’t prove that the word is a pure representation of an idea. There is still the speaker’s bias to consider. Anyone who has been around me would know that I choose any word in order to represent something that I’m trying to say. We all do it. Think to that scene in “The Princess Bride” where Inigo Montoya tells Vizzini “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Therefore if words rely on The Mind That Uses Them, then they are not static. And even if they are static for The Mind That Uses Them, there is still the audience to take into consideration. Even if The Mind That Uses Them has a static understanding of the word – lets say the general consensus, a dictionary definition – then the person receiving the communication may be biased and the probability of a miscommunication is great.
A poem by John J. Trause, a contributor in the current issue of the magazine (Vol. 4). If you want to read more, Vol. 4 will be on sale as soon as we unbreak our PayPal widget.
Kora in Palm Beach
She never really liked oranges,
but once while she was eating one
she accidentally swallowed six seeds.
She now spends half the year in Florida.
I just recently came across this 80+ minute, unedited interview on Slate.com, and just had to make sure that everyone else saw it. I've posted the first two parts but there are more, many more.
Here we repost the weekly poetry column brought to you, free of charge, by American Life in Poetry – an organization supported by The Poetry Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2004-2006, Ted Koosner. This week is presented a windy-cold and haunting poem by Don Thompson:
We don't have a lot of money. But what we do have is a murder of talented friends (just incase that doesn't make sense: "murder" is a term used to describe a flock of crows – e.g. a murder of crows – but I like it here: a group of artist, or cantors squawking for a purpose comprehensible only by themselves; and if they're doing it right, waking people up in the early morning with their bull shit and bombast). Anyway, some very talented friends of ours are making a short-short Artichoke Haircut film, which should be up on our website in the coming weeks. This is just a taste. A few stills from the set. Click here to see a few more.
Photos by Melissa Streat
"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." Dr. Samuel Johnson
Art thou pale for weariness?
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth, --
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?
I’m not exactly sure what it says about man, that he is always looking for something beyond himself, something greater than his surroundings? It could be that this question springs from, as La Rochefoucauld said, the fact that we can neither look the sun nor death directly in the face? And what does it say about the human race that we must mythologize these forces, and every force, for that matter, we do not understand. What manic insecurity we must have that we find it necessary to make up fantastical stories in order to escape from the thoughts born of those treacherously quiet moments, those moments that otherwise would be filled with thoughts of the smallness we feel pushing us into the ground, only to be mocked by the stars and the growing night?
It is impossible that one with even a tangential interest in modern culture has not suffered through a conversation on the power of language, a topic discussed ad nauseam in political discourse, academia, literary circles, theology, blah blah blah. Yet what is little discussed outside the arts (and esoteric, modern philosophy -- hi, Derrida), is what the desire to speak says about the human condition. We find it necessary to cognitively coral things within our experience, yet beyond another's, so that through speech they may indeed experience it. The human animal finds its own reality so endlessly fascinating, or unbearably terrifying, that it is impossible not to blather on about it, no matter who is or is not listening. What else explains the constant speaking into the void that is Twitter?
I could ramble on and on about Popa's use of myth, folklore, surrealism, etc. I could talk about the humor and sly intelligence which springs out of his deceivingly simple poems. I could talk about his use of repetition and cliché . But these labels and explanations would do little but distract attention from the man's voice. Instead I'll just let the 'lame wolf' poet from Serbia say it, and hopefully you will see it for yourselves:
It isn't that I dislike religious imagery in poetry, it's just that a part of my brain rebels and fights and screams whenever I hear it. It takes a bit of work and an excellent poet to crack through that prejudice and make me listen. Hopkins does, and his poem "God's Grandeur" shows the reader the wonder this planet can instill if carefully observed. He pulls you from ephemeral beauty into the blear of humanities' devastation of their environment. Yet there is no "the end is nigh" in this poem. With a touch of grace he pulls you out of the mortal tragedy in time to show you it's eminent rejuvenation. Such is the hope of religion I guess. Lets hope he's right:
God's Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
