fallen verses

(from here via notcot)

Make it big, and it’s art. Make it big, and public, and it’s art people talk about.

I wonder if the problem with poetry is that it’s too quiet now. The maddest among us don’t howl so much as froth. I certainly mumble in the background somewhere about the ephemeral. Maybe it just isn’t enough of a spectacle without obscenity trials?

Dana has had some thoughts about “public poetry” and swimwear in the winter is attention getting. But maybe too small*. Maybe.

Maybe we need to think bigger. Stop thinking about what I can do, and think, “what can we get a thousand people to do.” What makes it big.  Something to think about anyway.

*For the record, on attractive women, I do generally have the opinion that the smaller the swimwear, the better. Tongue-in-cheek sexism aside, it’s not the quantity of fabric, that makes the swimsuit (either much or little) but how it looks altogether.

…is the middle ground. Extremes (and complexities) of emotional response are pretty much our stock-in-trade. It might well be the ethos of the middle-brow suburban working stiff to parrot the old-media-spawned desirability of a ‘balanced’ perspective but the unbalanced, unpopular, subversive, perverse, creepy, critical, curious, unconventional and not-always-well-intentioned are just a few of the acceptable positions for genuinely creative and/or inquisitive minds”

-Hazel Dooney

I would like to think most of us are aware of HIV/AIDS and realizes these are a Bad Thing, but I don’t know. There are a lot of crazy people out there who believe the strangest things for no apparent reason (and, even worse, when shown they are wrong!). I can’t begin to understand that view, and I’ll simply say that I hope they are not participating in Blogger’s Unite: World Aids Day.

Tara from the Scienceblog Aetiology has written quite a bit about the science of HIV/AIDS, and anyone interested in learning some of the more technical information might want to check out her posts on HIV/AIDS. Information is also available at the National Institute On Drug Abuse and at AIDS.gov. (It may somewhat belabor the point, but the administration for the past 8 years has had a habit of lying presenting information in an unusual light, so government websites may warrant scrupulous fact-checking).

And remember, if you’re going to be engaging in potentially risky sexual behavior, use a condom.

I wrote this for my other blog, ineffably.net, but I thought someone might find this of interest here as well.

I wonder, sometimes, if people don’t view the word “ineffable” in the same light that I do. If it may be seen as undesirable, a lack, a failing. In some ways, it is a failing–a failing in language to communicate something*. I don’t think this is a bad thing, I place it more in the category of the sublime*.

Perhaps as technology marches onward and carries into more facets of our lives, it is frightening to think there are aspects of existence that words cannot encompass. Despite the ability to use audio and video, the internet is still, largely a text-based medium, and as more and more of our lives become caught up in its web**, we limit and restrict that aspects of our lives that cannot fit within the framework.

I’m reading Poetry and Consciousness by C.K.Williams and he begins that essay with a similar point. Language does not have the capacity to describe some elements of life, viz. emotion. As he says, we can call something sadness or depression, we can describe what seems to be the physical experience of them, we can talk about the reasons and effects of these emotions, but language cannot describe of the emotion qua emotion. Ultimately emotions can be talked about, can be talked around, but can’t be talked. Ineffable***. We can say fear is a cold knot in the stomach, but that doesn’t include the sharp stabs of terror when that fear may be actualized before we can think. And even then, what is the experience of that fear?

People can be understood. the actions of large groups are easy to understand. groups don’t have the same level of choice and valuation that individuals have. But an individual is so much more difficult to encompass.

The experience of an other is something that exists outside the realm of words. Sure, we can impart categories to people as we do to emotions. They can be funny or smart or cynical. They can be blonde. They can be slender. They can enjoy Mexican cuisine. They use a lexicon that is individual but listable. Their Her**** hair can have the smell of faded roses when you first smell it in the morning.

So go ahead, describe the person you love. I’d bet you can come up with a lengthy list of traits and historical facts. And I’d go further to bet that, no matter the length, that list fails at explaining that person. To paraphrase Viktor Frankl: Love is what allows us to experience an other in their uniqueness. I wouldn’t call it their soul (because I am not religious), but perhaps their logos*.

And that is something about each of us that transcends the descriptive capacity of language. It is something that can only be experienced, and only then, through love.

* Ineffable; Sublime; Logos (though Anima may be as usable)

** See what I did there: it’s after my bedtime, bad puns are excusable.

*** Yes, my love of this word is irrational. Most words I love are smoother, more elegant. Ineffable, pronounced as it should be, is clumsy. It’s the sound of a sweatshirt, not the smooth glide of hand over satin-clad curves.

**** Screw being gender-neutral. This really isn’t gender neutral in its explanation, though it is in its essence.

link (via Poetry Hut Blog)

Maybe I’m the only one who isn’t familiar with Lewis Hyde, maybe not. I don’t recall having ever heard of him or his book The Gift. If that NYTimes piece is indicative of his views, I probably should look into it.

Intellectual property is a murky idea. How do you really “own” and idea? How can you hold it in your hand? Or lock it away in a safe? Really, the only way you can own an idea is to never express it. That only prevents people from hearing your idea, not from coming up with it on their own. And, I suppose in fairness, generally ideas are not what is copyrighted, but the expression thereof.

Now, increasingly in this wikied and hyperlinked world, it is so clear the debts we owe to other authors, other artists, both contemporary and historical. To think that we, without respect of the contributions of others to our thoughts, ideas, and expressions, should own them seems, I don’t know if arrogant is the right word, but something along those lines.

Perhaps it’s a warranted desire, though. Perhaps.

I mean, we all understand the reasons for property rights (I hope). And they remain valid for, say, sculptors or painters. What real difference is there between those and poetry or songwriting other than medium? There isn’t. Ultimately it comes down to being non-tangible. There is, fundamentally, an unlimited ability to split it among “consumers;” unlike some of my other favorite things (viz. chocolate. that there is a limited supply of chocolate is a tragedy).

How do you reconcile these two ideas: infinite supply (or, at least, supply limited only by difficulty in sharing which increasingly approaches zero) and wanting to control and live doing creative work?

I’m not sure where that balance point is. On the one hand is the hobbyist artist (as I think many of us are) and the other is the professional artist. I don’t know if both can be the beneficiary of a intellectual property theory. As Lessig claims, restrictive copyright laws prevent creative arts that involve using other works, or reduces them all to using old works. That really hits contemporary creative conversations. On the other end, paid work gets more difficult to accomplish in the face of it being unprotected.

It’s tough when both sides have effective arguments and are largely irreconcilable.

Complain loudly enough, and the mountain will move for you (via Poetry Hut Blog).

Or, if not mountains, you can squelch free speech and artistic expression that does not match with your iron-age belief system. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems the “moderate christians” should be with the people standing up against this. If that group wants to play in the modern world, they need to invigorate the Jesus 3.0. The 1.0 guy has been dead for a long time, the 2.0 guy is a bigot and needs to shut up. Jesus 3.0 is the opportunity to look for the positive things faith can add to the world (if you believe there are any), rather than the fear and intolerance bandied about by the vocally religious.

Just when you think the world maybe has a chance, you keep seeing stuff like this. Makes me sad.

This is me not working on my NaNoWriMo project. Video from here about this. Usual caveat that if you see a gray bar, click it.

It didn’t take too much of that talk for me to understand it and realize I’ve been doing it wrong in a lot of my creative endeavors recently. In writing, or in my oft-neglected visual media, I get very goal-focused. I spend too much time thinking about the end product and I miss out on a lot of the things that makes creativity and art so wonderful which is the surprise that comes of it.

I haven’t been participating in many of the read write prompts for a while, but Nathan’s prompt and Dana’s Read Write Word were excellent prompts for me and, I think, are some of the better pieces I’ve written recently. Why? Why were those good but the image prompts escaping me? Why is Read Write Word 2 not as inspiring?

I think it has to do with being in that second form of play: building. The original prompts had so much to start with it was very neat to me to start pulling them apart and putting them back together. The first Wordle had thirty words, which I used only a portion of. The other prompts become more like the first type of play, the exploration. With so few options at our disposal, it becomes more about how many things can be done with a paper clip. And that is a situation where having knowledge gets in the way. If you don’t know what a paper-clip is, there’s no preconception, there’s nothing telling you can’t be… um… something else. Once you know, just by looking at it you wouldn’t see it as an element of wire sculpture, but once you’re holding them and molding them and twisting them together, you can build the new ideas that you would never have thought of.

Which is not to say that any type of creativity is better than any other. Seems to me they all fit different style and suit different purposes. But as a creative individual (or someone pretentious enough to cal myself one) all of these things are aspects. Some aspects may be strengths and things I should develop. Some things are weaknesses and should be avoided or worked on.

This NaNoWriMo experience is teaching me many things. I do not work as well from a blank page as I do from a full one, even if the full one is full of random nonsense things. When I was younger I used to draw (poorly). Then, I was more of a LEGO kid. It suited me better having chaos as a starting point than openness, I guess. Anyway, what are your thoughts on playing as artists and wordsmiths? How do we take those styles of play and put them into our writing practices?

from TED

This video is about this guy with the unpronounceable last name’s research into the mental states of creativity, etc., which he calls “flow.” An interesting look at the psychology of creativity in relation to the “normal” world.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives. A leading researcher in positive psychology, he has devoted his life to studying what makes people truly happy: “When we are involved in [creativity], we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life.” He is the architect of the notion of “flow” — the creative moment when a person is completely involved in an activity for its own sake.

Er, if you don’t see a video, click one of the gray bars and it should load the player.

via Poetry Hut Blog

Burger King Launches Canadian Online Poetry Contest (link)

…

Haiku is an ancient form of Japanese poetry consisting of a set number of syllables per line: five syllables in the first line, seven in the second line, and five in the third. The website includes haiku samples and an easy-to-use haiku-writing application….

/boggle

I think this calls for bullet points:

• “Ancient” is a very fluffy word in this context. Language is so fluffy to begin with but then we take words that have meanings and we stretch those meanings and stretch them and stretch them and soon, they have holes big enough in their ears you could mini-putt through them! So, while this is true, it is only true in some meanings of the word. Regardless, I don’t think I would call the 17th century ancient.
• Syllables: well, Japanese does not have syllables, so it is, in fact, impossible for Japanese poetry to have a form based on them. Japanese is measured in on (which are moras), which are not syllables!!!!!
• Per line? Well, the line issue. The glaring 5-7-5 of grade school prosody. Haiku (as an independent form) were not three line poems. Often, they were written in one line. Or, when mixed with visual arts in haiga, were formed according to how they best fit with the image (something the poets at Postal Poetry are working with).
• 5-7-5… well, remember, not syllables in Japanese, but on. Haiku are not 5-7-5, not really. They employ (in their most formal sense) a kireji (cutting word) after the fifth or twelfth on. The kireji serving as a point of separation similar to colon, semicolon, dash, ellipses, something of that nature. A little math and you can see how 12/5 or 5/12 gets thought of as (5+7)/5 or 5/(7+5) to get the tripartite form we use in western haiku.
• “easy-to-use haiku-writing application”  ????? write text, count, edit text, recount. Notepad does this!!!!

Feel free to ignore the man behind the curtain wearing the gold paper crown.

And feel free to ignore whoever wrote that idiotic trade-journal article. I mean, fuck, if you don’t know what you’re talking about, WIKIPEDIA it! How about, mr. fast-food-writer-man*, you write about the new innovation in fryers and leave the poem-talk to people that know more about poetry than your average 4th grader!

*I say man, of course, meaning the non-gender specific referent for person while still conveying “The Man.” mr. fast-food-writer-person just wouldn’t have had the same edge to it.

I don’t know if most people’s conversations with friends talk about philosophy and psychology and culture and generally ignore sports, but mine do. A couple of weeks ago I was hanging out with my best friends playing Rock Band 2, and during a short interlude I put forth a theory I have about happiness (and a quick note that she is pursuing a graduate degree in counseling or something and he is a doctoral candidate in philosophy and they’re married) to my friends which spawned a bit of a conversation and resulted in the quote I had posted:

Creativity is about understanding implications. Depression is also about understanding implications, but maybe too many of them.

So, the theory which spawned the conversation (and please ignore the implicit valuation) I (now) call the shape-complexity theory:

• You can reduce people to shapes. we already use the language, “people are faceted.” Some people are simpler people, and may be the triangles or rectangles of the world, and on the other end you have irregular dodecahedrons all the way to, I dunno, Mandelbrot Set people.
• Happiness is the ability to connect the edges of your shape to the world through some means, art, friendship, romantic involvement, etc.*
• Simpler people have a much easier time connecting.
• Complex people, however, can appreciate the connections made much more. They are not necessarily happier, but much more aware of the challenge and triumph in making those connections.
• The corollary to the above is that complex people are more likely to experience the extremes of both happiness and unhappiness because of the complexity of engaging seemingly or actually contradictory facets.

From there, it was determined that while creativity was not a province of the complex, it is connected. Both are about viewing the world around them and making unlikely connections between things. Both inherently approach a state of discordance and it is in that place of tension that art is found. Consider most things that are made just for being the thing: tools, crafts, sandwiches- these are not art. Art is a statement, art is an action. For something to be an action there has to be a better/worse dichotomy. Tension. Unlikely connections. While these have the capacity to be wonderful connections (Neruda’s incredibly lush Cien Sonetos de Amor as one example) they also have the capacity to be troubling in much the same way that depression is awareness of the troubling connections possible.

Then, today, I see a link at The Poetry Hut News Blog to a CNN story: Experts ponder link between creativity, mood disorders.

The research of Verhaeghen and colleagues shows when people are in a reflective mode, they may become more creative, depressed, or both. Previous research shows that when people are in a ruminating mode, they are more likely to be depressed, he said.

“If you think about stuff in your life and you start thinking about it again, and again, and again, and you kind of spiral away in this continuous rumination about what’s happening to you and to the world — people who do that are at risk for depression,” he said.

…

Sensitivity to one’s surroundings is also associated with both creativity and depression, according to some experts.
Creative people in the arts must develop a deep sensitivity to their surroundings — colors, sounds, and emotions, says Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, professor of psychology and management at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. Such hypersensitivity can lead people to worry about things that other people don’t worry about as much, he said, and can lead to depression.

I’ve never suggested that I’m original, but if I’m thinking about these things and scientists are off studying them and I’m not aware of it, that means, to some extent, these are obvious things. But sometimes we neglect the obvious as intent as we become on some far-off or abstract goal. Then Dana tells us:

That is precisely the trick: to create poetry in the midst of the mess. To create poetry, you must enter the mess. Poets enter the mess of the world in ways most can’t or won’t.

As for sound mental health advice, that may be contrary to reality. If rumination and awareness are part of the problem, it may be better to avoid those things!

But is it worth it? Is it worth it to shut off that part of yourself, to voluntarily amputate some portion of your mind, reduce the facets of you? For some people, I’m sure, the answer is yes. But as artists,isn’t it pretty fundamental to who we are that we live in that world of mess and we make what sense of it we can. Some of us may only treading water, some of us may be leaping like dolphins and flying fish willfully going deep into the water to soar into the sky? And as for the sharks, well, they need to eat too, I suppose.

I’ll end this with two thoughts- Be aware that there is a line between creativity and madness and cross it if you want, but be aware of it.

Make it worth it! If you are going to be in the mess, if you are going to be making the connections to the world that no one else can make, make it worth it.

*Though I removed it, I also included genocide in this list originally, but I felt it changed the tone too much. Some people have sources of happiness that are harmful to others and civilization and pretending otherwise is false. To some extent everyone has those views, I think. But for most people they are incredibly minute and satisfied by reality television and celebrity tabloids.

**I had someone read this before I posted it to see if it made sense in the world outside my head, and the response I got was that it did make sense, but it was swimmy-feeling at the beginning. this is apropos of nothing.