Monday, September 20, 2010

Some observations on a first book of poetry, Jean Genet & the nature of writing as "wound"




When I decided it was now time to assemble (for a first book of poetry) some fifty or sixty poems culled from hundreds written over the past eight to ten years, I don't think anything could have prepared me for what was to come: in particular, the degree of engagement in poetry itself (and language) and the vital necessity for honest self-assessment it entails.And, come to think of it, I've never been more acutely aware of my age either. I still can't shake the feeling that the better a poet is, the earlier the writing must have started so that late-bloomers like me are also condemned to suffer from bouts of self-denigration. I always seem to be looking over my shoulder rather than at the poem in front of me, conscious of all the writers who'd started much earlier, foolishly plotting writing proficiency on some sort of age-rated scale that has, of course, little to do with the nature of things. I wonder where this instinct to kill the artist in a work barely begun comes from. Why the insecurities now?

Meticulous editing & careful (and, at times, excruciatingly slow) sifting through hundreds of poems, combined with questions of literary style & suitability, are unpleasant aspects of the publishing game. Not to mention the question of the best publication route (mainstream, small press, chapbook, etc.), over which there is endless debate these days, and the printing costs & the horrendous expenditure of emotional & psychic energy involved in moving a literary product. I enjoy sending out the odd poem to print or ezine magazines; and I enjoy poetry readings even more. Poetry as performance has always appealed to me as does its usual theatre and tone and variable pacing: & nothing can quite hold the audience's attention more than the vital difference between personality and poem. But to turn inspired writing, almost a poem for every significantly lived moment, into a final 'codex', bound for posterity or oblivion, seems to me a bit unnerving, not to mention crassly egotistical. And to read out of that same bound book of poems (as all too many poets do) to an ever diminishing market is to reduce it to a pure spectacle: one which has, in fact, lately turned the performance into a technological 'theatre of cruelty'.

And, of course, the critics, from Internet hack to the more academic (usually 'grad school') type, hover over every verse line: my experiences with them have been so unfavourable that I also seem to have formed this 'literary committee' in my head on whose final deliberation the success of every poem depends. A committee that's every bit as Kafkaesque as it sounds. I'm embarrassed to admit how often a critic's unkind remark about a single misplaced word or unintelligible line has set me back. Eliot's famous injunction to regard the critic's role as being solely an elucidatory one leaves me cold:— it's never occurred to the great man to consider that criticism can disclose a literary intention as easily as a weapon. At least, it's felt that way to me at times. The art of critique can be predatory and it's not something to which I've become fully accustomed yet.

So why write, & why publish? And how to get over the impediments of age, endless revision, diminishing self-confidence & fear of the critic's blade? Well, I'd prefer to change a question into a statement and make the writing a reason for the knife itself. It's small (or no) comfort at all but it's the way it is. Let the imminent negatives of writing open into a wound! Writing precisely because of the gashes it's bound to inflict and because slashing is, after all, what the critics & readers are there for. French novelist, dramatist & poet Jean Genet, in his famous essay on sculptor Alberto Giacometti, said that "Beauty has no other origin than the singular wound,different in every case, hidden or visible, which each man bears within himself,” (from "The Studio of Alberto Giacometti" in The Selected Writings of Jean Genet, ed. Edmund White, p. 310) and it's from him I derive this central insight into the nature of artistic creation in general. It's perhaps from this that a good deal of my own gnawing self-doubts necessarily arises (I can't claim to having attributed it to anything but a decision to publish & acquaintance with the writings of this remarkable author).


I say without reservation that writing is a wound because nothing exposes more the wound of human frailty &weakness & the essential fissure in the ground of art itself. It can almost be stated as a tautology. Writing isn't designed for dogmatism or critical posturing: the frail scaffolding of ineffective imaginations and ineffective writers who equate singularity (in the uniquely insightful sense used by critic Derek Attridge) with the boredom of a single artistic style or viewpoint. Nothing is as stultifying & unsatisfactory (to me) than awards-friendly work since a very large part of what constitutes artistic genuineness—namely, the violence of alienation and rejection resulting in injury—is always denied to these few acclaimed winners who've been too sheltered too soon from the knife. To the few who are always too few to matter, of course, precisely because they never seem to miss the mark.

Art (poetry, in my case) that's afraid of "infirmity" (318) isn't worth the bother: without the limp the work can never be known. Even the tragic shamefacedness of artists who've been all but eliminated reveals an essential space of pure beauty reserved only for them. As American poet Jack Spicer says, "You only have the right to piss in the fountain/If you are beautiful." The marginalized always stand out easily in a crowd of the self-congratulatory: at least I can spot them. On the other hand, fêted authors in a system of literacy by bureaucracy (such as we have in Canada) walk too brazenly in the open for their own good because that vital "elimination of the viewer" (320) is denied them, the invisibility they fear more than non-recognition. It's in this "total solitude" (328) the beauty of work, and of the worker, resides. Genet's estimation of Giacometti's sculptures and drawings applies to art, and the artist above all, and is worth quoting in full:
Giacometti's art, then, is not a social art that would establish a social link between objects—man and his secretions—but rather an art of superior beggars and bums, so pure that they could be united by a recognition of the solitude of every being and of every object. 'I am alone,' the object seems to say, 'hence caught within a necessity against which you are powerless. If I am only what I am, I am indestructible. Being what I am, and unconditionally, my solitude knows yours.'" (328-29)
But small comfort this is, the growing mistrust of ability & scope never having been driven home so hard. After all, Giacometti is Giacometti & and the artistic record speaks for itself; in fact, it's even likely that Genet's essay was written only as a sort of homage to the man who'd sculpted his own face. And if that's the case, Genet himself can be accused of a sort of sycophantism. But that's missing the point, obviously. The piece is autobiographical, as is my own account of the terrible inner-demons that the act of self-promotion (that is publishing) calls forth: demons from whom writers of any ability and means must receive that distinguishing mark of the damned. Derek Attridge says, "The text remains a writing as long as it is read" (The Singularity of Literature, 105): I say, respecting the same "act-event" of creativity, the poem widens into a wound even as it's being written, one that's felt long after it's been solidified into book form. Now perhaps a haunting memory.

2 comments:

Irina M. said...

There are many threads in this post, Conrad, that run across a ‘mis à nu’ of a poet’s creative process.

Each of them probably merits a discussion in itself.
A thought I have is that poetry, as a form of art, is likely to inflict a most lethal type of wound – an insidious one, which we never quite outgrow and which continues to magnify upon its continuous inspection until it gushes out, horribly irrepressible, in - well, a collection of poems.

There is little to be done, except accepting it all and bearing the slow death by poetry as best we can in gnawing doubt and solitude. This reckless act of self discovery is perhaps balanced by one secret attribute a poem holds: a healing gift - a gift born out of disbelief.

I enjoyed reading this wonderful post.

Conrad DiDiodato said...

Irina,

thank you for your eloquent & insightful comments. I find Genet's views appealing because he's among the few who won't romanticize writing. And neither will I. It's a "horribly irrepressible" thing,as you've said, inciting and bloodying the writer at the same time.

Perhaps it's even self-inflicted.