August 11, 2009
There is only so much reading and writing I can do before I fall asleep or run out of things to say.
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I sometimes think that Silliman's insistance on hsi terms School of Quietude and Post-Avant is really not much more than marketing. It's what he has to sell. In fact, I kind of feel that way about all aesthetic theory, at times. I mean, I relize it's importance, and enjoy and benefit from it, but it's not like there is any truth to be arrived at. But it does draw attention to what one hopes is worthy work and helps it sell
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If I had to assign an aesthetic label to myself it would be Post-Romantic. Basically, I'm a lyric poet concerned with things like the self. Which I guess might make me more of a modernist, but really, wasn't Mondernism in many ways just Romanticism adapted to the 20th century? Or so it seems to me.
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I sometimes think that Silliman's insistance on hsi terms School of Quietude and Post-Avant is really not much more than marketing. It's what he has to sell. In fact, I kind of feel that way about all aesthetic theory, at times. I mean, I relize it's importance, and enjoy and benefit from it, but it's not like there is any truth to be arrived at. But it does draw attention to what one hopes is worthy work and helps it sell
*
If I had to assign an aesthetic label to myself it would be Post-Romantic. Basically, I'm a lyric poet concerned with things like the self. Which I guess might make me more of a modernist, but really, wasn't Mondernism in many ways just Romanticism adapted to the 20th century? Or so it seems to me.
posted by Poetry Bear at
8:19 AM
2 Comments:
I love how your day job (ad copy) is pervasive in the way you think/approach the world...do you remember me telling you that story about the student of Jack Spicer telling how one of Spicer's assignments was to take some product like toothpaste and write ad copy for it, which seemed easy enough, but once they sat down to do it, they found it incredibly difficult and complex, and it changed their relationship to language, and how its taken for granted, and how the idea of communication in general is multi-layered/dimensional in ways we never think about; and another assignment Spicer gave them was to bring in a work of their art, a sculpture, or a painting, or a piece of writing, etc., and they had to write a paragraph description of one of the other students' works of art, then Spicer would read them out loud, anonymously, without letting them know which artwork was being described, and none of them could figure out which artwork was which based on the written paragraphs. Is ad copy art?
i've come up with the phrase, alt-lyric poet, for my own turn of writing. i don't want to give up with bodily 'i' and the mind's 'i' too and i'm not very concerned with the failure of language since of course it's a failure. but so am i.
it was the swedish poet, tomas transtomer, who worked as a clinical psychologist and snapped at an interviewer when asked for the umpteenth time how is job impacted his poetry. transtromer hit back with, how come no one asks how his poetry affected his day job.
i like the thought that your day job influences your writing and vice versa as suggested by sampson. this is, in my own humble opinion, how poetry is enlarged in the world.
two-cents for what it's worth. recently discovered your work and enjoy stopping by here.
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