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On Poetry and Culture Shock

Does love kill the Muse?

After knowing that the atmosphere in Mars is less that 1% as dense as the Earth’s, so even the fastest winds can hardly be felt at all.
Wild, fast and pointless.
Looking for a cheap love cure.
Like the winds in Mars.

Cuando supe que la atmósfera de Marte tiene menos del 1% de densidad que la de la Tierra, por lo que los vientos huracanados ni se sienten.
Rápido, salvaje, sin sentido.
Buscando un vulgar remedio amoroso.
Como los vientos de Marte.


Some time ago I said that "last summer I attended a sort of conference for poets, which publishers and other interested people attended too". Actually, I lied. I didn't attend the conference, I was only there because I won a prize in a poetry by text message competition and I'll give you that poem on another occasion (you find a fraction of it if you google my full name, Eugenia Andino Lucas, but I hate that website's layout). Anyway, there was a dinner and I had the chance to talk with a few professionals, amateurs like me, and publishers, and someone quite ruthless said a way of telling apart the bad amateurs from the promising ones:

Lots of young people write poetry. They are easy to sort out because the mediocre ones stop writing when they get into a steady relationship.

That fits nicely into the usual male-oriented explanations of the creative impulse as something nearly sexual. There is the Sheherezade model: being creative makes you sexy. There is the Sublimation model: you put into creating the energies that you'd put into sex if there was an available partner. There is the Oedipal model, the idea that you write because you want to beat your influences (your influences are your ather and Art is your mother: apply Oedipus to the triangle)

I haven’t had the opportunity to see if that critic's theory applies to me, but I doubt it. Not because I believe I am above mediocrity, but because I think I write faster and better when I have an audience. I think it's very funny (in the "strange" and in the "amusing" senses) how some of my most creative spells, the ten-poems-a-week fits, have taken place in that bubbling ground at the very earliest stages of relationships. I am curious about whether, if I ever have a steady relationship again, that person (or me getting lazy and comfortable) will kill my Muse. I hope not.

By the way, is anybody interested in a post about the Muses? Any fans of obscure mythology reading this?

1 comentario

Aurora -

¿Seguro que la musa muere? ¿No será que se marcha a atender otros asuntos, caprichosa como siempre? Sigo sin estar de acuerdo con el triángulo edípico aunque, claro, yo al arte ni lo conozco ni lo quiero conocer y quizá por eso no le tengo cariño filial. Al fin y al cabo, el arte es una cosa tan subjetiva (para mi, que por mucho que el Guernica sea una obra maestra lo considero un adefesio hecho cuadro), que puede ir conjunto con las influencias. Y las influencias van cambiando según vamos leyendo y aprendiendo, luego la madre es un poco zorra si el padre nunca es el mismo y... Y me estoy liando :S