Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
I've thoroughly enjoyed reading everyone's comments.

Wallace Stevens, in one of his essays in 'The Necessary Angel,' said
that the role of the poet is "to help people to live their lives." 
That sounds right to me.  The poets I've come to love, to know by
heart, give voice to a landscape, or an idea, that is often elusive, at
the edge of my grasp, perhaps at the edge of theirs, and yet it's
there. It's there, not in a prescriptive manner, but more as a gesture
towards something more full of life than "things as they are." I think
this may have been what Stevens thought of as the imagination pressing
back against reality. Does Stevens' sense of the poet's role ring true
for you?



(I'm off to the bookstore to buy your book.)
  

    
Therese's and Joe's posts are so eloquent I am tempted to just sit back for
a while and listen. This of course is not allowed. I am supposed to speak
here once a day.

"To help people live their lives" is a consummate definition of poetry's
role. Wallace Stevens's comments about poetry are close to as high an
artform as the best of his poems--his aphorisms, in Opus Posthumous, feel to
me what a pirate's treasure chest must feel to a child. Each statement a
glittering jewel. Frost had that gift as well. The one thing that I must add
to Stevens, if I am to be truthful, is that the impetus for me is almost
entirely selfish: it is my own life that needs help. For the poems then to
perhaps help anyone else's is surplus. It may have been different for him,
for some other poets, or not. This is hard to know, since we ourselves are
hard to know, and a person's own statement of why they do anything is hardly
to be taken as authoritative. If "authoritative" could exist at all, in
these matters.
  

    
>the impetus for me is almost
 entirely selfish: it is my own life that needs help

This is exactly what came to mind for me when I read Therese's post. 
Helping others live their lives is not a "well-formed outcome." It is 
beyond the artist's ability to effect. The artist goes mining. To the 
extent that the human condition is universal, what the artist comes up 
with may be of use to others. It may be that this is one measure of how 
great an artist is: The truly great artists speak across the ages and 
across cultures because what they have found is so universally true of 
the human condition.
  

    
That last point strikes me as deeply true itself. That certain stories,
images, phrases hit bedrock, whether it's the Oresteia or King Lear or a
five line poem by Izumi Shikibu. And I doubt that Aeschylus or Shakespeare
of Shikibu was thinking about anything while writing beyond the quest to get
it right, whatever "it", at any particular moment, is. The odd thing is, all
us lesser mortals are doing the same thing. Any child at work on her drawing
is doing the same thing, if she's drawing for her own reasons. So how those
great ones find their way to bedrock is the inexplicable mystery, that can't
be bought or sold or trapped or taught. Yet it can be learned.

I saw the Calder exhibit at the SFMOMA last night. An artist who was
completely himself from boyhood to age. He couldn't help himself: that work
was who he was. It felt like stepping into a river. And a few of the pieces
were miracles, impossibilities that stop you in your tracks and make you
laugh--you just can't help it. Yet they are profound at the same time.
  

    
It occurs to me to clarify: by "it can be learned" I meant that the great
ones aren't born great--you can see the evolution into it, so clearly they
are somehow learning their way forward.
  

    
>The artist goes mining.

I like that. And sometimes when the artist goes mining she strikes
gold.  Maybe in the beginning she's not sure it's real--it could be
fool's gold; but, in this case, it's tested and proven to be pure. So
the artist, as miner, soon learns to recognize gold when it is found,
and others recognize it as well; still no guarantees, but hard earned
wisdom. 

Perhaps that's where Jane's clarification: "it can be learned," takes
root. The artist is in search of something. She always runs the risk
that nothing of value will be found, but she persists with an awareness
that a rich vein of gold exists and may be tapped again. With that
persistence, talent, and the fortune of time, the artist is able to
create; she eventually understands that this process of creating is who
she is, and that she can rely on herself to get up, on most days, with
a desire to mine.  With just that degree of sureness to a day, the
artist takes on the role of 'helping people to live their lives,' if
not by the product of the art, by the process of the life. 

I think the great ones know the gold for what it is, and have a strong
impulse to share the wealth; at that point, the value is in the
exchange. 
  

    
Do you know Lewis Hyde's early book, "The Gift"? Your final thought leads
straight to that association for me. A book about anthropological gift
exchange cultures in its first half, art/poetry in its second. "The gift
must always move" is a sentence that captures the basic current: what comes
to a person as gift must in turn be given.

I wonder, does anyone reading here have some idea about how it is that a
person recognizes true gold, distinguishes it from fool's gold? I know I'm
asking here, rather than answering, but that seems to me one of the greater
mysteries in art-making. How does the inner assayer judge the ore is one way
to describe the question that almost all my essays (the literal essays, the
prose ones) are trying to address. Yet there's an almost instantaneous
knowledge, too. Gladwell's "blink." I read a poem (someone else's) and feel
the presence of gold, or not. (And the other question is whether one
person's "gold" is the same as another's, and at what level? Most agree
about Shakespeare, but about John Ashbery, Eliot, Jorie Graham, one reader
might be passionate for one, but not the others.)
  

    
Fool's gold is easily distinguished from real gold if you have seen and
examined both. Gold is soft, heavy and malleable; pyrite is harder, lighter
and brittle. Nevertheless, the poet should be aware, just as the prospector
is, that fool's gold often contains a small proportion of real gold that can
make the difference in making a profit.
  

    
And isn't fool's gold usually found, too, where real gold can be? 

The Renaissance reminds me of this context. It's a stream, a river, a
goldbed. We are lucky it held so much real gold -- but it brought forth
some pyrite as well. 
  

    
Two profound comments, those.

The true weight in poetry though must exist in some way in what the
Japanese call "the world of between," rather than in the objective
world. A poem's words, when not in someone's consciousness, are worth
their weight in ink. Yet they do not change, inside that waiting. They
are stable and patient. And if read by someone who doesn't read their
language well, or who lacks the mind of poem-reading, or who simply
does not know how to read this very poem for what it might hold, they
are still worth their ink-weight. Only when a person responds to them
fully and when they have something in them to respond to might they be
heavy and malleable and of value rather than brittle.

A friend, Stefanie Marlis, a long time ago wrote a poem in which she
imagined natives pouring out the heavy metal-dust into the sand,
keeping the valuable leather pouch. That the image has stayed with me
all these years is one sign that it is some real thing, no? What an
elegant way of saying that gold isn't always gold, sometimes it's
leather. Sometimes it's sand, if you're in need of something to hold
out a flood.

(And, nice to see you here, Steve--)
  

    
This is the only chance I'm going to have to come here today, so I am just
saying that I was here. See you tomorrow.
  

    
Happy Monday Jane.

This morning I was doing a google search and had one of those lovely
moments of hyperlink serendipity.  I went to a page that had an
enexpected link to an essay on poetry and the mind, and clicked to find
an essay including this thought...

  "The creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all,
  consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image, and 
  in elaborating and shaping this image into the finished work. By 
  giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the 
  present, and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to 
  the deepest springs of life.  Therein lies the social significance 
  of art: it is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age, 
  conjuring up the forms in which the age is most lacking."

...from
  "On the relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry" by Carl Jung
  at:  http://www.studiocleo.com/librarie/jung/essaymain.html

It reminded me of my clumsy question about teaching and poetry, and it
fell in my lap, so I wanted to bring it back here.


A question about your writing cycle.  When you are taking a book
around, do you stop writing for a while, or does that have any bearing
on your process?
  

    
"Therein lies the social significance
   of art: it is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age,
   conjuring up the forms in which the age is most lacking."


That is quite wonderful, and seems to me to move toward a slightly different
point than the preceding sentences. And it seems to me a very good addition
to the Stevens comment above, that poems exist to help people live their
lives. They also exist to recall us to the parts of our self that are easy
to lose.

I don't know if this will come across at all out of context, but I was
reading a poem by Leonard Nathan earlier this morning, and he had in it the
wonderful description of a man "easily distracted from (by?) essentials." I
love the economy of that two-fold statement, and all it brings with it: like
a small hook dragging a large net filled with unspoken thoughts.

To your question--

I have been very surprised by how that is going this time, as opposed to all
the earlier periods when I was this busy with outward events. Usually I
don't write at all when doing so much. This year, I have actually been
more prolific than I usually I am. I can't explain it at all, but I have
been writing a run of new "pebble" poems during the past few weeks. It's
been a gift, and one that keeps me feeling more in balance in my life, to be
making new poems. I don't think this will persist once I start getting on
airplanes to do out of town readings.

A larger level answer might be: writing process isn't a stable thing for me.
It changes all the time, always surprising me when it does. I remember
distinctly the first time I wrote a poem before daylight. "I am not a
morning person," I thought, "how did that happen?" Now I write many of my
new poems before daylight, and none late at night. It feels a bit like
surfing must: you catch the waves when they come, and the waves' arrival is
not in your own control. But you have to be there, in the water, for it to
happen.
  

    

I'm reading along and enjoying the questions and your responses a great
deal, Jane. this is the best topic on the WELL at present.
  

    
>you have to be there, in the water

What is "being in the water" for you?
  

    
Thank you, Mary! That, coming from you, means a lot.

Being in the water... First I'll tell you a story I once heard about a
painter, though I've forgotten which painter it was about. He was asked,
"Can you work when you're not inspired?" "Oh, no, certainly not, I need to
wait for the Muse to come before I can paint." "And when does the Muse
come?" "Oh, usually when she finds me working."

I love that story, but it doesn't describe me. If there's no inspiration,
the pen is not in my hand. So for me, to be in the water, waiting for the
wave, is some prior condition--a permeability, a quieting of other kinds of
internal speech so that the speech of poetry might begin to be heard. An
alertness of a certain kind. I believe that poetry is probably in truth
always out there to be found, if a person is attuned to the poem-possible
mind. As if the surfer could call forward the waves, if he or she were truly
ready. But I cannot will that attunement, I can only invite it. Sometimes it
comes, sometimes it feels so distant I cannot even remember I am supposed to
be a person who has ever written. The soul's eyes open and close, it feels.
One state is a paradise, the other exile. But sometimes, the poems might
come to look at exile... which is one way back.

I am free-associating a little here... This two weeks has gone by quickly,
and ends I think tomorrow. I know the topic can continue, but I begin to get
on airplanes pretty soon for out of town readings, which makes getting
online more difficult. We slipped this in to the one good period I knew
there would be for it. It would not be a bad place to close, thinking about
how it is a person comes into the condition of writing at all. It is to me
utterly mysterious. The quieting I describe above is part of it, but not the
whole story--there is something more active than that, which quiet and
concentration allow. The reaching out toward meaning which is the "prehend"
in the words "comprehension" and "apprehension." THe Greek root from which
poetry comes has the meaning of "making."

We each of us make the world we live in, in one way, and are helpless to
change the world we live in, in other ways. Poems are a spell against that
helplessness and for the creative sense, and the hopeful sense, I think, in
times that can feel unhopeful. Music the same, painting the same. They alter
the world to the degree that it can be altered.
  

    
I just cried a little reading that post, and the question I came here
to ask seems so pedestrian now. I think I will still try to ask it.

I am referring to Tiffany's post earlier, where she said something
along the lines of, reading your poems, it feels the poet's self, while
observing and speaking clearly, is also veiled in the words.

What am I trying to say... let's try this.

Some artists' work feels like an undressing in a way, each artistic
gesture one of peeling off layers to reveal the skin. Experiencing work
like that feels like looking at the artists' naked self. It feels 
almost indecent - but when the art is great, it is not art for
exhibitionism's sake. It is just very naked art.

Does it seem fair to you to say that you are not one of those artists
- that your words weave a cloak for your naked self? The naked self is
there behind the veil, but your impulse is not to reveal that self. It
seems the work is not about you in the world so much as about the act
of observing the world, the relationship between the self and the
universe, that movement between the two.

(I am going to add here that I am not making a value comparison
between the two types of art I am claiming to exist. I think the
quality of the work is not tied to the nature of the impulse, not the
way I mean it.)

Is there work which to you feels more "naked" than other work? (I
mean, your own work). If my observation isn't completely missing
everything, that is. Have there been changes for you in this respect?
  

    
I have enjoyed reading this topic, Jane. Thank you for sharing with us
your deep and shining spirit.
  

    
Jane, thanks for your generous responses, and the pure gold (leather,
sand...) of your poetry.
  

    
To answer sussu--I think you are exactly right in your description, as
was Tiffany. There are a very few poems which are narratives in which
someone who knew the facts of my life could see those facts told
directly--"1973" is one, and "Talc." But my work never looks like
Sharon Olds, or Dorianne Laux (both poets whose work I love), and
though I'm sometimes compared to her in reviews, I think it doesn't
look like Louise Gluck either (another poet I love). I also love Robert
Lowell's nakedness, his direct statements of self in the world. I have
one poem that I think makes a statement much like his, a genuine
confession, and my sense of privacy inclines me to not name that poem
here. 

The exposures feel present to me, but it's as I said earlier: the
x-ray or CAT scan or MRI rather than the nude portrait. None of us
would recognize one another from our x-rays, our MRIs, yet that level
is also the way we live in this world. It's perhaps easiest to see in
the poems of "The Lives of the Heart." So many emerge from times of
great difficulty and undoing, and are records of attempts to live
through and answer that undoing. But the grammar is "the heart," not
"my heart." And as you say, sussu, it's not that I think one aesthetic
is better than the other. It is what's possible for me, and what makes
a path for me, what is cure and liberation. There are many doorways to
enter suffering and joy. And in poetry "I" can mean "I" or it can mean
"you," or it can mean "he" or "she." And the same in the other
direction--everything said in a poem, every description, is a statement
of the state of the soul, and of the speaker. Japanese poetry threw
open its doors and windows for me when I first began to understand
that, the relationship of objective and subjective. The cloak is always
transparent. 

To those of you who've been saying "thank you"--you are very welcome.
Thanks also to the hosts of Inkwell, to Joe for starting this
conversation, to each of you who've been reading and each of you who've
made a comment or kept the conversation going with a question.
I would never do this kind of thinking or speaking if left on my own,
only write poems--all the essays of Nine Gates were written because I
was asked to give a talk, and all these thoughts come only because a
conversation fishes them out of me. Thanks for coming and fishing.
  

    
"Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a
being with my soul and my memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot
River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise...

"I am haunted by waters." 
  

    
Jane, I honestly think the definition of poetic 'gold' changes with
the decades, eras, centuries. Few people now find Alexander Pope
'golden' (tho Byron did), but almost all do Shakespeare, Donne, The
English Metaphysicals. I've often said that the post-WW2 generation's
early exposure to haiki (in translation) set a core-std. that didn't
previously exist; from that comes a belief in living poetic 'cores'
rather than formal superstructures. Result: You don't hear anybody
saying how great Longfellow is anymore; but I do expect Robert
Browning's dramatic-monologues (=Victorian slam-poetry) to become
popular again.   
  

    
This topic has been a great gift (even partially speed-read on a hotel
sofa in Maui, after a surf lesson, with a headful of sand and
water...)

Thank you for your many gifts to us, Jane, and thank you everyone in
this topic for wise, interesting, insightful, delightful posts and
questions. And thank you Joe for getting this gift-topic to such a nice
start.

Several times after reading this topic I have gone straight to writing
something, and I like reading what I have written in that way. It's
tremendous.
  

    
Oh, I just can't believe two weeks have passed already! Each day, this
has been a special time that I've saved for myself, to come and savor.
Thank you so much!
  

    
I have loved reading this beautiful gem--school takes soo much time;
thank you all.  sorry I didn't participate--just in my head but maybe
noone heard.  ;-)