Because the blogosphere needs haikus.
On Poetry and Culture Shock
Se muestran los artículos pertenecientes al tema The Creative Process.
24/09/2007
Recycling the disposable
Today, I have been forced to hear the Top 40 radio station for almost an hour. This is well known for its disposable music, and it seemed to me untiul recently that songs were popular for a shorter and shorter period of time. Now, however, I have been shocked to find that about half the songs played were two to ten year old. One song was from 1991. Does this mean that the producers that make song after identical song have definitely run out of ideas? Or that no one wants to take the risk of playing anything remotely new?
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Hoy no he tenido más remedio que escuchar cerca de una hora de Los 40 Principales. Hasta ahora, la música de ese tipo era verdaderamente de usar y tirar, pero ahora resulta que, sorprendentemente, Los Cuarenta ponen canciones antiguas, de entre uno y diez años. Más o menos mitad nuevo, mitad antiguo. Los Celtas Cortos promocionan una gira con una canción del 91.
No es que me parezca mal que se escuchen temas más o menos clásicos, pero esto me preocupa. ¿es que los productores se han aburrido de repetir la misma canción? ¿a estos extremos llega el miedo a hacer nada mínimamente nuevo?
22/02/2007
Prose poetry
Poetry Thursday's prompt for last week was "prose poetry". I like prose poetry, but I think that there are lots of problems in the form and in the way it is often understood.
The three classic main types of text are dialogue, narration and description. All of them can be in prose or in verse form. For example, Shakespeare uses both verse and prose in his plays (which are, by their very nature, dialogues). Novels are, for the most part, prose narrations, and epic poetry is verse narration. Description is equally possible in prose and in verse, too. For example, I think that lyrical poetry is description of feeling.
The problem with prose poetry, the way many people understand it, is that it is necessarily a description, preferably of a setting, a location. Even teachers at the University level understand that prose poetry is what happens when the narrator of a novel takes up a paragraph with long sentences and pretty adjectives to describe a sunset or a room. I think that the possibilities of prose poetry are mostly unexploited, but if we widen the field, we need a definition so that we know where we are. We could start by saying that prose poetry is prose that shares as many poetic qualities as possible, excluding the ones related to line formation. We can have all the other phonic devices (rhythm), we can have the pleasure of language for its own sake, a greal deal of nuance, and all the semantic devices we expect in poetry, like metaphors.
The best two works of prose poetry that I know certainly include a lot of description. They are Written on the Body, by Jeanette Winterson, and Platero and I by Juan Ramón Jiménez. Both are mostly descriptive, but have enough action to appeal to compulsive novel readers. The language is beautiful, without smothering the message in metaphors. The subject matter is commonplace (romantic love, rural life) treated with originality. The best of what poetic prose can be.
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La sugerencia de Poetry Thursday para esta semana era "prosa poética". A mí me encanta, pero creo que hay algún problema en la forma en que normalmente se entiende.
Los tres modos clásicos de elocución son el diálogo, la narración y la descripción. Todos ellos pueden ir en prosa o en verso. Por ejemplo, Shakespeare lo mismo usaba prosa que verso en sus diálogos en teatro. Las novelas son son narraciones en prosa, y la poesía épica, narración en verso, La descripción puede ser en prosa o verso también, y puede decirse que la poesía lírica son descripciones de sentimientos.
El problema de la prosa poética es que para mucha gente es necesariamente descriptiva, a ser posible de un lugar. Hasta profsores de Universidad entienden que la prosa poética es una sola cosa: lo que pasa cuando el narrador de una novela ocupa un párrafo entero en describir una puesta de sol o una habitación con frases largas y muchos adjetivos. Yo creo que las posibilidades de la prosa poética abarcan bastante más, si usamos una definición como, por ejemplo, prosa que comparte la mayor cantidad posible de características de la poesía, pero no la formación de versos. Puede haber algún recurso fónica (ritmo), y un lenguaje cuidado, acrobático, con matices, con los recursos que esperamos de la poesía, como las metáforas.
Las dos mejores obras de prosa poética que conozco son Escrito en el cuerpo de Jjeanette Winterson, y Platero y Yo de Juan Ramón Jiménez. Son muy descriptivos, pero también tienen mucha acción, y mucho humor. El lenguaje es precioso sin ser cursi, sin ahogar el mensaje en metáforas. Los temas son corrientes (el amor, la vida rural) pero tratados con originalidad. Lo mejor a lo que puede aspirar la prosa poética.
25/09/2006
On creativity, mediocrity and love.
I posted this four months ago, but things have changed dramatically, so please bear with me and read on.
About two years ago, I attended a sort of conference for poets, with publishers and other interested people. There was a dinner and I had the chance to talk with a few professionals, with amateurs like me, and publishers, and someone quite ruthless said a way of telling apart the bad amateurs from the promising ones. I'm translating as faithfully as I can, and I wish I remembered the person's name:
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: you write because you want to beat your influences (your influences are yourf ather and Art is your mother: apply Oedipus to the triangle.
I have always doubted that this theory applied to me. Not because I believe I am above mediocrity, but because to me writing doesn't make sense if there isn't an audience, and most of the time I write better, or faster, or both, if there is an audience. The truth is, I am on the brink on testing if it does apply. Being in love, as I am right now, leaves me changed for words. There are new things to talk about, but hardly the words to do so. The interesting thing is that I'm not a good writer of love poetry; I know that much. If I'm lucky, the intensity, the sheer joy, will translate themselves in new ways of talking about the usual stuff: my trees, my cities, birds, weather, stranger's hands. If I am not lucky, well, the world will have lost me as a poet, but I might be too much in love to miss the Muse.
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Hace un par de años, estuve en una especie de congreso o encuentro para poetas, con editores y otros interesados. Hubo una cena bastante informal en la que tuve ocasión de hablar con profesionales (es decir, poetas publicados), aficionados como yo, y gente que no escribe pero sí tiene que ver con el mundillo (editores, políticos que dan subvenciones, y demás). Alguien brutalmente sincero dijo lo siguiente:
Muchísima gente joven escribe poesía. Es fácil separar a los mediocres de los demás porque los mediocres dejan de escribir en cuanto se echan novia.
Eso encaja muy bien con las explicaciones habituales del impulso creativo como algo casi sexual. Está el modelo Sheherezade: ser creativo te vuelve sexy. Está el modelo Sublimación: pones en tu arte las energías que dedicarías al sexo, si tuvieras con quién. Está el modelo Edipo: escribes porque quieres ganarle la partida a los artistas que son tus influencias (tus influencias son el padre y el Arte la madre).
Siempre he dudado de que esa teoría sirviera para mí, no porque piense que estoy por encima de la mediocridad (no es el caso, os lo puedo asegurar), sino porque para mí escribir no tiene sentido si no hay un lector, y si sé que tengo público, siempre escribo mejor, o más rápido, o las dos cosas. Lo que ocurre ahora es que estoy a punto de comprobar si la teoría se me puede aplicar. El amor cambia cómo me llevo con las palabras. Hay cosas nuevas de las que hablar, pero las palabras de siempre no sirven. Lo curioso del caso es que no se me da nada bien la poesía amorosa, eso lo tengo claro. Si tengo suerte, la intensidad, la pura felicidad de ahora se reflejarán en formas nuevas de hablar de lo de siempre: árboles, pájaros, el tiempo, las manos de la gente. Si no tengo suerte, pues bueno, el mundo tendrá una poetisa menos, pero tendré buena compañía y no echaré tanto de menos a la Musa.
20/09/2006
Poetry and Beauty.
In Spain, there is an association called the "
Real Academia Española", The "Spanish Royal Academy", which publishes the most prestigious dictionary in the country. The Academy's opinions are prestigious but not official; that is, contrary to what happens in France with the
Académie, the Spanish Academia does not rule about what is "real" Spanish and what isn´t.
Well, the dictionary gives this as the first and sixth definitions in its long entry on poesía, "poetry":
Expression of beauty or of aesthetic feeling through words, in prose or verse.
Idealization, lirical quality, that which provokes a deep feeling of beauty, expressed or not in language
This is nonsense, because it is incomplete. Well, it is a dictionary, not an enciclopedia or a literary manual, but still. The problem is that it does not make sufficiently clear that "beauty" is a quality of the work, not necessarily a quality of the people, objects, or events poetry describes. Let's see. Can we write poetry of the ugly? of course we can. The beginning of the Iliad deals with a man getting very angry with another because on the course of a war, they are fighting about which one gets to keep an enslaved priestess. That is not a pretty topic! If we like the Iliad it is because it shows beautiful language and because it makes familiar things unfamiliar.
Another example. Shakespeare. Richard III. What is there of beauty is a hunchback, a man considered ugly by all the other characters, telling the audience how he plans to kill all his relatives because the have a better claim to the throne that he has? The words he uses, those original, beautiful-sounding word.
A problem arises, of course, when the poet is not good enough or the circumstances are so close to us that the familiar cannot be made unfamiliar. I don't think Turks or Africans or the children of victims of gender violence would appreciate Othello. But as Shakespeare proves, that doesn’t mean that a jealous husband killing his wife is unfit for poetry.
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La Real Academia Española, al contrario de lo que mucha gente piensa, tiene opiniones prestigiosas pero que no son oficiales y normativas. Es decir, no como en Francia, donde la Académie decide qué es lengua francesa y qué no, la Academia no decide qué es español y qué no (vimos una muestra de ello cuando elaboró un informe diciendo que era incorrecto el uso de la palabra “género” para querer decir “sexo femenino o masculino” en la Ley Integral de Medidas contra la Violencia de Género; el Parlamento aprobó la Ley con el nombre que quiso, dijera lo que dijera la RAE). Esto es lo que el Diccionario de la RAE da como primera y sexta acepciones de la palabra "poesía":
1. Manifestación de la belleza o del sentimiento estético por medio de la palabra, en verso o en prosa.
6. Idealidad, lirismo, cualidad que suscita un sentimiento hondo de belleza, manifiesta o no por medio del lenguaje.
Dicho así me parece un poco absurdo, porque queda incompleto. Se trata de un diccionario y no de una enciclopedia o un manual de Literatura, pero aún así. El problema está en que no queda suficientemente claro que la belleza es una cualidad de la obra, no de la gente, objetos o acciones que la poesía describe. Veamos. ¿Se puede escribir poesía sobre cosas feas? Por supuesto que sí. El principio de la Ilíada trata acerca de un hombre que se enfada muchísimo con otro, porque en el transcurso de una guerra no se ponen de acuerdo sobre cuál de ellos se queda con una sacerdotisa que ha sido apresada y convertida en esclava. ¡No es un tema muy bello que digamos! Si nos gusta la Ilíada, es porque utiliza un lenguaje hermosísimo y porque vuelve ajenas cosas que nos resultan familiares.
Otro ejemplo. Shakespeare. Ricardo III . ¿Qué hay de bello en un jorobado, un hombre considerado monstruoso por todos los demás personajes de la obra, contándole al público que piensa matar a la mayoría de sus parientes porque se interponen entre él y la sucesión al trono? Pues las palabras que utiliza, ese fabuloso lenguaje Shakesperiano.
Surge un problema, naturalmente, cuando el poeta no es lo bstante bueno o las circumstancias son tan cercanas que no se puede crear algo original. No creo que turcos, africanos, o los hijos de víctimas de violencia de género, por ejemplo, puedan disfrutar de Otelo. Pero como Shakespeare demuestra, eso no quiere decir que un marido celoso que mata a su mujer no pueda ser objeto poético. Y ahí, encontrar belleza en algo que no sean las palabras se pone complicado. Quizá la razón de que no me convenza la definición de la Real Academia es que parece pensada sólo para la poesía lírica.
07/09/2006
The creative process as seen by Toteking
I haven't made a Creative Process post in ages. I heard this today as I drove and it always brings a smile to my face because of course, Tote is thinking of rap, but haikus normally have three lines. A haiku a day is certainly a triumph.
I serve a voluntary sentence in the notebook prison, where
three lines a day are a triumph.
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Hace tiempo que no opino nada sobre el proceso creativo. Esta mañana escuché esto mientras conducía y siempre me hace sonreír, porque evidentemente Tote está pensando en rap, pero claro, los haikus tienen tres líneas. Y un haiku al día también es un triunfo.
Guardo condena voluntaria en la cárcel del cuaderno, donde
tres líneas al día es un trofeo.
20/05/2006
History of Western Poetry.
Poesía popular (universal): Quiero acostarme contigo.
Antiguo Testamento: No sé lo que es, pero seguro que está prohibido.
Lírica griega (Anacreonte): Quiero emborracharme antes y después de acostarme contigo.
Lírica griega (Safo): me encanta acostarme con mi marido, pero mis amigas son especiales.
Épica griega: Un hombre (o dios) se acostó con quien no debía, y mira la que armó.
Lírica romana (Catulo): Follar, polla, coño, HHmmmmm!!!!
Épica romana: Nuestros héroes no se acuestan con quien no deben.
Nuevo Testamento: ¡Dejad de prohibir cosas y quereos un poco!
Épica medieval: No quiero acostarme con nadie, estoy demasiado ocupado matando dragones / en la guerra (depende del país).
Lírica medieval: véase poesía popular.
Lírica medieval sacra: No quiero acostarme con nadie, estoy demasiado ocupado enamorado de la Virgen María.
Lírica medieval culta, no sacra: Laura no quiere acostarse conmigo.
Lírica renacentista: Estella sigue sin querer acostarse conmigo.
Shakespeare: Quiero acostarme con muchachitos vestidos de mujer.
Lírica postrenacentista (Inglaterra): Paso de ti, si no te acuestas conmigo ya lo hará otra.
Lírica barroca (España): Después de haberme acostado contigo, haré penitencia.
Neoclasicismo: Todos los anteriores deberíais haber utilizado mejor sintaxis y haber sido educativos, panda de sinvergüenzas.
Romanticismo: mi sufrimiento queda mucho mejor en los poemas que mis ganas de acostarme contigo.
Postromanticismo: Quería acostarme contigo hasta que descubrí las drogas.
Modernismo: ¿Sexo? Quién quiere sexo con lo bonito que es contemplar el nenúfar en el lago?
Vanguardismo, surrealismo: Los edificios grises de la gran ciudad quieren acostarse con los espinosos rosales del parque.
Música pop/ rock: véase poesía popular.
Canción protesta: No nos dejan acostarnos juntos, y me da coraje.
Popular poetry (universal): I want to have sex with you.
Old Testament: I don't know what you're talking about, but I'm sure it's forbidden.
Greek, lyrical (Anacreon): I want to get drunk before and after having sex with you.
Greek, lyrical (Sappho): I love having sex with my husband, but my girlfriends are special.
Greek, epic: A man (or god) had sex with someone he wasn't supposed to, and see what a mess he made!
Roman, lyrical (Catullus): Fuck, cock, ass, Hhhmmmmm!!!!!!
Roman, epic: Our heroes don't have sex with whoever they're not supposed to.
New Testament: Will you stop forbidding things and love each other for once!
Medieval epic: I don't want to have sex with anybody, I'm too busy killing dragons // at the war (depends on the country).
Medieval, lyrical: see Popular.
Medieval, lyrical, sacred: II don't want to have sex with anybody, I'm too busy loving the Virgin Mary.
Medieval, lyric, not sacred or popular: Laura won't have sex with me.
Renaissance: Estella won't have sex with me either.
Shakespeare: I want to have sex with boys dressed up as women.
Post-renaissance (England): Whatever, if you won't have sex with me, someone else will.
Baroque (Spain): I'll be penitent after you have sex with me.
Neoclassical: All the previous ones should have used better syntax and should have at least tried to be educational. Pack of shameless good-for-nothings.
Romantic: My suffering looks a lot better in a poem than my wish to have sex with you.
Post-romantic: I wanted to have sex with you until I discovered drugs.
Aestheticism: Sex? Who cares about sex when you can gaze at the beautiful lilies?
Modernism, surrealism: The grey buildings of the big city want to have sex with the prickly roses at the park.
Rock music: See Popular.
Protest song: We're not allowed to have sex and it pisses me off.
19/05/2006
A reason of artistic inspiration?
About two years ago, I attended a sort of conference for poets, with publishers and other interested people. There was a dinner and I had the chance to talk with a few professionals, with amateurs like me, and publishers, and someone quite ruthless said a way of telling apart the bad amateurs from the promising ones. I'm translating as faithfully as I can, and I wish I remembered the person's name:
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: you write because you want to beat your influences (your influences are yourf 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, for the very simple reason that I have not had a long-term relationship since I started writing "seriously". Even so, I doubt it works on me. 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 both the "strange" and in the "amusing" senses) how most of my most creative spells, the ten-poems-a-week fits, have taken place in the 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.
22/03/2006
Poetry and beauty
In Spain, there is an association called the "Real Academia Española", The "Spanish Royal Academy", which publishes the most prestigious dictionary in the country (sorry, María Moliner). The Academy’s opinions are prestigious but not official; that is, contrary to what happens in France with the Academie, the Spanish Academia does not rule about what is "real" Spanish and what isn´t (some Spaniards mistakenly think it does, but that’s another story). Well, the Academia dictionary gives this as the first and sixth definitions in its long entry on poesía, "poetry":
- 1. Manifestación de la belleza o del sentimiento estético por medio de la palabra, en verso o en prosa.
- 6. Idealidad, lirismo, cualidad que suscita un sentimiento hondo de belleza, manifiesta o no por medio del lenguaje.
Expression of beauty or of aesthetic feeling through words, in prose or verse. Idealization, lirical quality, that which provokes a deep feeling of beauty, expressed or not in language. This is nonsense, because it is incomplete. Well, it is a dictionary, not an enciclopedia or a literary manual, but still. The problem is that it does not make sufficiently clear that "beauty" is a quality of the work, not necessarily a quality of the people, objects, or events poetry describes. Let’s see. Can we write poetry of the ugly? Of course we can, and we don’t need to resort to very modern stuff to prove it. The beginning of the Iliad deals with a man getting very angry with another because on the course of a war, they are fighting about which one gets to keep an enslaved priestess. That is not a pretty topic! If we like the Iliad it is because it shows beautiful language and because it makes familiar things unfamiliar.
Another example. Shakespeare.
Richard III. What is there of beauty is a hunchback, a man considered ugly by all the other characters, telling the audience how he plans to kill all his relatives because they have a better claim to the throne that he has? The words he uses, those original, beautiful-sounding words. The problem is of course when the poet is not good enough or the circumstances are so close to us that the familiar cannot be made unfamiliar. I don’t think Turks or Africans or the children of victims of gender violence would appreciate Othello. But that doesn’t mean that a jealous husband killing his wife is unfit for poetry. Sadly, the most prestigious dictionary in the Spanish language seems to prefer a definition of poetry that applies better to works about flowers and butterflies.
14/03/2006
Jazz
I generally dislike jazz on principle. The idea behind jazz is more or less the same as in free verse: as long as the central idea remains, you’re free to go in and out of the rhythm. I see jazz in one corner of a triangle with soul and blues on the other two. Blues is occasionally too monotonous; jazz is too free; soul has the perfect balance. This is something explained humourously in the novel The Commitments by Roddy Doyle, whose characters prefer soul, without a doubt. I agree with them: jazz is way too self-indulgent. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything as boring as Miles Davis. Sorry.
The surprising thing about this is that I should not like Django Reinhart, who takes a theme or song and makes it jump and run all over the place, turns it backwards and inside out and then goes on as if nothing had happened. But I’ve just discovered Reinhart and I think I’m in love. If I could post music like it was a poem, I would. But I can’t, so stating my newly discovered love of Reinhart will have to do.
Edited to add: Coincidentally, Fitopaldi quotes someone who also despises Jazz. Heh. This may be the explanation of why I don't like Heavy Metal either.
08/03/2006
Women and poetry
I thought that, because today is the international Women’s Day, I would post a poem from a different woman poet every day of the week. The problem is, I hardly ever read (or enjoy) poetry written by women. Chronologically, my list of adored women novelists starts in Jane Austen, two centuries ago, and then there’s the Brontës and plenty of 20th century ones. But poetry, not really. I find the discovery surprising. Why aren’t there more excellent female poets, if there are plenty of excellent women writers? I think these are some of the reasons:
- Women not being allowed to learn to read and write. This applies mostly to the times in which only the upper classes wrote. So, upper-class women with artistic inclinations before the late Middle Ages might have learnt to compose poetry, but not write it.
- Women being able to read and write, but not receiving any further education. This applies from the late Middle Ages to the early 20th century.
- Women receiving some education, but not in the fields that everyone around them considered relevant for a poet. This is relevant most of all in the Renaissance and the couple of centuries that followed: 16th to 18th centuries. The idea is that women did not know much about classical antiquity or dead languages, and the current trends of the time were for poetry that imitated classic models. Therefore, women who wanted to express themselves poetically knew that their message was faulty.
- Women being told that having ovaries is an obstacle to good writing. Read the introduction to The Madwoman in the Attic if you want more information, as I can’t say anything you won’t find there.
- Women who finally can write and feel confident about their skills don’t turn up until the last couple of centuries. Hardly anyone can make a living out of poetry, and besides, someone who is painfully earning the right to be heard would rather write about stuff more immediate that lyrical poetry. Novels are ideal: wide readership that can provide an income (writers need to eat too), and a way to express ideals and at the same time tell stories.
We don’t really have valid reasons for the near absence of truly brilliant poetry by women over the last century or so. I imagine they exist, but I have hardly heard of them. I’ll keep looking for the best, no matter if the writer came with an uterus attached or not. I hope you enjoy the absolutely biased selection of poems I’m preparing for the rest of the week.
20/02/2006
Damned if you do, damned if you don't
It bothers me the extent to which feminist criticism can easily become resentful and defeatist. It’s very hard to make good feminist criticism; I understand it as paying great attention to gender roles and more attention than has been given previously to female characters, under the assumption that gender roles are a construct. Not much more than that. Feminist criticism does not need to assume or denounce that women are badly represented by an especific piece of art, because the problem with this is that _all_ art can be put under suspicion.
Let’s put action and crime movies and TV as an example. We like to see violence onscreen. the problem of feminist analysis is:
Female victim, and you’re accused of perpetuating the role of women as passive victims. Pretty victim, you glamorise violence. Ugly victim, she has been punished for being ugly.
Female villain and you’re accused of making your female characters unlikeable.
Male villain and victim, you’re accused of inventing an all-male world. I have seen analysis of Harry Potter around the publication time of the third book that complained that Wizard women are too passive and badly represented.... because there were no female villains.
Same for every theme. We live in a world in which women are undoubtedly mistreated so some of us are too used to see the author mistreating the female characters. I don’t want to do that in my work as a critic, but it is nearly unavoidable.
18/01/2006
Adjectives
I love the Spanish writer (columnist, novelist) Elvira Lindo. now that she is living in New York City she so often tells in her columns things that remind me so much of my own reactions to Americans.
This little fragment from her latest column is originally about political journalism, but it applies very well to many other things!
Sé de un profesor de redacción periodística tan extravagamente sensato que escurre los periódicos ante sus alumnos como si fueran estropajos y sacude los aparatos de radio para que se vacíen de adjetivos. Es lo que hace el artista cuando madura, decir lo que quiere de la forma más simple.
I know of a professor in a Journalism school who is so extravagantly sensible that he squeezes newspapers in front of his students as if they were cleaning rags and he shakes radios to thrwo out the adjectives. That's what artists do when they mature: they say what they mean in the simplest possible manner.
26/12/2005
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Today is Saint Stephen, which is an occasion as good as any other to talk about Stephen Dedalu, a self-parody of James Joyce with a starring role in his novels Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. The Portrait tells Stephen's life from early childhood until he decides that, if he wants to be An Artist, he needs to leave Ireland and go to Paris where all the cool Bohemian kids are.
Stephen's problem is that he tries too hard to be cool. The chronological end of his adventures, as far as Joyce wants to tell us, is that after he has gone back to Dublin and can barely survive on his teaching salary, he meets a truly nice and generous man, Leopold Bloom. Optimist readers may think that after this encounter, Stephen will go and live for free in Bloom's home, sorting out the older man's loneliness (Bloom lives with his wife, but to say they have a communication problem would be the understatement of the year), and the young man's housing problem.
What of Stephen as a poet? The narrator likes to be ambiguous and never tells us if Stephen is a good artist. All you get of his style is that he is or wants to be very complex. The only poem of Stephen's in the books is this one, included near the end of the Portrait. Critics say that with it, James Joyce wants to tease readers: we are predisposed to like or dislike the poem according to our like or dislike of Stephen and we always need someone to tell us that it is OK to like something. The professor that introduced me into the Portrait said that the poem is there to show that Stephen wants to be a rebel but will not succeed because he has chosen a poetic form, the villanelle, that is formally very demanding: putting form so far above content is not a good sign. I think the poem is just like Stephen: too complex, and it takes too long to say too little. But the most interesting thing about it, as I say, is not whether I like it or not, but the way it is placed near the end of a novel whose ongoing enigma, its tiny plot, is the question, "Will Stephen ever manage to be A Great Artist as he wishes to be?". Instead of having qa comfortable narrator that tells you yes or no, all you have is Stephen's poetry so that you have to make up your own mind about poor Stephen's artistic ability.
Ok, now, judge for yourselves.
Are you not weary of ardent ways,
Lure of the fallen seraphim?
Tell no more of enchanted days.
Your eyes have set man's heart ablaze
And you have had your will of him.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?
Above the flame the smoke of praise
Goes up from ocean rim to rim.
Tell no more of enchanted days.
Our broken cries and mournful lays
Rise in one eucharistic hymn.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?
While sacrificing hands upraise
The chalice flowing to the brim,
Tell no more of enchanted days.
And still you hold our longing gaze
With languorous look and lavish limb!
Are you not weary of ardent ways?
Tell no more of enchanted days.
25/11/2005
Trainspotting the movie: Is it a comedy?
Trainspotting , the movie, is an excellent example of the theory that “tragedy is a slap on the face; comedy is a slap on someone else’s face”. It is a lot easier to make comedy about whatever is different from you, which means, in the case of Trainspotting, that if you have seen the effects of drugs from too up close, if you cannot see them with detachment, you might like Trainspotting, but you will not see it as a comedy. The first time I saw it, about nine years ago, the most salient thing to me was the black, weird humour. Now I still love it, but the things I really appreciate have nothing to do with the plot; they are formal aspects, such as the cinematography and the editing. I also enjoy precisely what makes the movie closer to me, what I can relate to (and that goes well beyond comedy): the accents, and the places that I know.
By the way, the film was shot on location in several different Scottish towns, which means that in the now classic “Lust for Life”, Renton-chased-by-the-police scene, he runs away in Edinburgh, crosses the street in front of the Glasgow Museum of Modern Art, and is caught by the police back in Edinburgh. That’s quite a long distance to run.
26/10/2005
Shakespeare vs, Britney Spears?
I have discovered a philosophy site with a few interesting (and rather geeky) games. One of them teaches about the characteristics of art: it asks you to give rate six characteristics art is supposed to have and then it checks how two artists or so-called artists compare according to your own criteria.
This is what I think of the six characteristics the site gives as elements of a work of art:
Great technical ability: Necessary but not essential. It depends on the degree of beauty, maybe.
The work is enjoyable: Again, necessary but not essential.
The work conveys the feelings of the artist: Absolutely unnecessary, of course.
The work conveys an important moral lesson or helps us to live better lives: Again unnecessary.
The formal features of the work are harmonious and/or beautiful: Necessary but not essential.
The work reveals an insight into reality: Essential. Art makes you see the world through different eyes. Having said that, to me language is part of reality,so a work that is very self-referential, a work that plays with language is also revealing an insight into reality.
What I find interesting, rather than the results the test gives to me, are the rates other people have given. Everyone else thinks that the most important value is that the work conveys the feelings of the artist (noooo, bleh, the world is too full of Bécquer fans, yuck), and that it is enjoyable. Beauty and moral lessons are not popular. Feeling and fun are.
You can check the game yourself here.
19/10/2005
Preferred and dispreferred responses
I have dedicated
four separate
entries to
Grice's
Maxims, which are very useful for the construction of dialogues. The maxims have to be seen in the context of preferred and dispreferred responses. The theory is very easy: If you ask someone to marry you, you hope a “yes” and you fear a “no”. Anything that is not a “yes”, including “maybe” (which is uninformative), extra information, being asked back something else (“Will you marry me?” “How long have to been waiting to ask?”), jokes, irony,
anything, is a dispreferred response.
When you say a compliment, you expect a thank you. Sometimes you expect modesty: “What a lovely meal” “Oh, it’s nothing, it’s a very simple recipe”. That is a preferred response. Anything else is dispreferred.
When you ask for permission, you hope a yes and fear a no. You ask your boss if you can leave early on Thursday. Yes is preferred. “Yeah, right, and next week you’ll ask Thursday off, and the following week you’ll ask Thursday off and a rise”. That sentence is not a “no”. Still, it is a dispreferred response because it is delaying a real yes or a real no. It is breaking
Maxims Three and
Four. As answers to “Can I leave early on Thursday?”, the difference between “How are you doing with this week’s workload?” and “You can leave early on Thursday if you’re nearly finished with the week’s assigned work” is that the question is a dispreferred response; the conditional yes is not a good as a plain “Sure!”, but still, it is a preferred response because it is straightforward.
In short: the preferred response is what a person (or character) wishes or anticipates to get as a plain answer. Anything else is a dispreferred response.
The worst dispreferred response of them all is silence.
02/10/2005
Virginia Woolf as a literary critic
Like any other artist working overtime as a literary critic, Virginia Woolf’s criticism, witty and tough, says that writing should be what she did. This passage from A Room of One’s Own sounds harsher than it really is because I’ve taken it out of context, but even so there is some truth in it (if you’re reading from Spain, remember that fatal means “lethal, deadly”):
“It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman. And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death. It ceases to be fertilised… it cannot grow in the minds of others”
What would Woolf have thought of literature written from a purely queer perspective? Or about political literature, leaving gender aside, that puts a “stress in grievance”? I think she is exaggerating a wee bit, although I agree if what she means is that whatever there is of political in writing must be subordinated to the attempt to achieve excellency (whatever excellency may be).
30/08/2005
Grice's Maxims, 4 and last: of brevity.
I have let too much time pass between each of my posts about the Maxims.
Here you
have the other
three.
Grice Maxim number Four: Be brief; be informative. This does not mean “use few words”, it means “make all words mean something”. There are two extremes to break the rule: one is not providing information:
-“What did you do today?” “oh, nothing, the usual”.
And the extreme of giving lots of words and no information: tags, fillers. “Coletillas”. This is an easy way of making your characters sound different from each other and it was a favourite technique of Charles Dickens. Repetitions fall here too. Consider the difference between: “I can’t” and “I can’t, seriously, I just can’t”. Remember that we are talking about fiction: the one that talks like that is a character, not the narrator. Characters can do all sorts of things that the narrator isn’t supposed to do, like using the most trite phrases. Have a narrator saying: “As a matter of fact,” and you’ll kill the flow. Have a character say “As a matter of fact,” and you’ll be building up their personality.
01/08/2005
Grice Maxims 3: of relevance.
I will continue with the series on how to use conversation rules as studied by linguistics,when writing dialogues in fiction.
THREE: Be relevant; be informative. I think this rule is the one we break most often. We change the subject when we want to talk about something different, or when we don’t want to answer a question. People who seem too talkative are often simply irrelevant: you get bored of listening to them, because what they say is not appropriate to the occasion.
In fiction that is not absolutely masterly, everyone gives straight answers,but we don’t do that in real life. If you use any instant messenger system, save and reread any longish conversation you have with a friend, and you’ll see what I mean. The uses of this maxim in fictional dialogue are endless. These are a few:
-Understatement: A person who doesn’t want to say something bad of someone else may point at an irrelevant good feature of that person. “Oh, but she has a beautiful smile”. You just don’t want to say she’s skinny and flat as an ironing board.
-Withholding information, like our ironic man of Maxim One (Be truthful). “What did you do today?” “Why do you want to know?”
-Characters that relate everything that happens to other people to themselves. Imagine three characters talking about a fourth person, who is sick, and one in the trio insists on describing his last illness, to get sympathy.
22/07/2005
Grice's Maxims 2: of politeness.
I willcontinue with the series of recommendations on how to apply Grice´s Maxims to the composition of dialogues in fiction. Grie's Maxims are four rules that we all follow (and expect others to follow!) in conversation.
Maxim 2 is: Be polite. This is culture-bound. For example, Americans say “Have a nice day” as a standard form of goodbye and it sounds terribly phoney to foreigners (it is impossible to translate into Spanish, it just doesn’t sound credible). Your characters can skip courtesy formulas, or overdo them. In Jane Austen’s Emma there’s a spinster that Emma considers an awful bore, and you get the impression that the poor old lady never stops speaking, but her problem is that she is overpolite, thanking people over and over again. At the other end, consider the power of someone walking in a room and starting to talk without saying hello: there will be a hostility plain to your reader. Agressiveness can be communicated like that, discreetly.
Politeness includes not interrupting people, and letting them speak. If you want a character to be overenthusiastic, rude, violent, anxious, or something like that, they can cut everyone else in the middle of a sentence.
15/07/2005
Grice´s Maxims 1 (How to Write)
A very quick review: I have said before that all artists that stop to write a guide to creativity say “Art should be what I do”. And then I made my own manifesto, in negative form: things that any poet/writer should not do. This is my first try at positive, constructive theory, and it’s
not “Art should be what I do” because I’m talking about dialogue, which isn’t a strong point with me. What I’m going to say is indebted to Juan Pablo Mora, professor at the University of Seville, and
Robert Millar, professor at the University of Aberdeen, who made the very dry subject of Linguistics relevant to me.
When they teach you grammar in school, they teach you how to analyse isolated sentences. Grice and others realised that sentences are in connection with each other, and developed the analysis of those relations. That part of Linguistics is called Pragmatics. On the sentence level, when you write dialogue you may consider “Do people speak like this?” But then, you have to think of how they relate to each other. Example: Oliver Twist says “Please, sir, I want some more”. And because he is
not supposed to ask for more, the action of the novel starts. Don Quijote is funny because he talks to ordinary people as if he was a character in one of his favourite novels. Here is where Grice comes in: he devised four rules that we all follow when we talk, unless we break them with a purpose. These maxims mean that your characters don’t need to talk straight and help you advance plot, but talk differently to help you show their personality. I’ll make one entry for each maxim so that you don’t fall asleep.
ONE: Be truthful. In human speech, lies can happen because the listener assumes the speaker is truthful, but this rule isn't only about lies. This rule means “Say what you mean”. Irony, exaggeration, and understatement break this rule. When a character ignores this rule in a coherent way, you can make them seem dry, detached but still with a sense of humour. “This guy knows more than he says he does”. Even if it’s just mild irony, your character is powerful because s/he knows the truth, but doesn’t say it.
13/06/2005
Neil Gaiman writes about the purpose of Art.
Commenting on the sneak-preview reactions to the novel he is just about to release, Neil Gaiman writes this:
as an artist (of any kind) you make things for an audience, normally because you like them. You hope they'll work. (An analogy I used in the Locus interview, talking about short stories, was making clay pots at school. Sometimes you get a pot. Sometimes you get something only a grandmother could love.) And you hope, mostly, that people will like or enjoy or appreciate them. (Or sometimes, just that the story will prickle people or make them think.)It is probably true. I write better when I have an audience; when I don't have one, or at least when I'm not writing becuase someone else's prompt, after I'm done the question is the same: Is this good enough to show to my best friend? to my poet friends? to my mother? The measure of whether I like my own work or not is normally my intuition of whether something that has never seen the light would be enjoyed by people I know. Having said that, writing for a audience can become pornographic in the sense that I'm giving my audience exactly what pleases them, making things as easy as possible for them. I had a professor that called your average bestseller "masturbation" because they told you what to wanted to hear. Too much pleasure, too little challenge.
In one of the literary online groups I belong to there is currently a heated debate bout the worth of James Joyce's
Ulysses. The attackers have mostlyone argument: it is incoomprehensible and art should be understood before it is enjoyed. They invert the terms of my professor's understanding and think that the book is "mastubation" in the sense that the book is so hermetic that the author has all the fun and leaves the readers out of it.
As usual, it is a matter of balance. Too easy and it's too flat. You might please the crowds or bore them to death. Too hard and you create a freak that very few people might love fiercely and everyone else will despise, or be afraid of.
08/06/2005
Pablo Gervás and creative computers
I am very serious.
I want to marry
Pablo Gervás.
I wish I could just link you to his interview in El Pais today, but you have to pay to access that, so you will just have to trust my summary. Pablo Gervás is a researcher at the Computer Science department of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid who liked poetry. So, he has develoved six different programs that compose poetry using the extremely strict metric (scan & rhyme)rules of the Spanish "Siglo de Oro" (the Golden Age of Spanish literature, roughly late Renaissance and early Baroque). Each program has a different style; for example, there is one who sacrifices content to sound with surreal effects ("The Madman"). What a genius!
In the interview he admits he started to write poetry as a seduction strategy. See, Pablo, I'm going to be on your side of the ocean in six weeks, would you like to go out for a coffee or something?
06/06/2005
A pyramidal theory of art.
I created this theory of art to tease the Elusive Poet; I don’t remember well his reaction, but I think he agreed. By the way, if you haven’t followed this blog from the beginning, the Elusive Poet is a friend of mine who writes, but doesn’t let anyone see his work, hence the nick.
So, the Pyramid Theory. Imagine a three-sided pyramid:
Side 1 is Unoriginality, terseness, boredom, flatness. “Writing degree zero”. Journalism, technical writing, the unliterary.
Side 2 is Sentimentality, the cheesy.
Side 3 is Pretentiousness, the ornate, innovation.
En español es más sencillo: plano, cursi o pretencioso.
Art is like a ball in an impossible equilibrium at the top of the pyramid; we may disagree about where exactly a work stands (for example, I will forever defend that Bécquer's poetry is always too sentimental and often too pretentious), but the point is not to grade individual works. Art is not a multiple choice test. The purpose of the pyramid is the artist’s self-evaluation: look at whatever you create, and you’ll see how anything that you’d like to improve falls into any of those three faults. It is the simplest measure I’ve found to tell myself whether something must be destroyed or not.
Generally, I have to fight more with pretentiousness in poetry and sentimentality in prose. Unoriginality takes care of itself; trying to be deliberately original makes me pretentious.
30/05/2005
Feminism, Women's Studies, Gender Studies
An anonymous Spanish reader left once a comment here saying that making a distinction between literature for/by queers, for/by women, is discriminating, and that we should only pay attention to whether literature is good or bad. Excuse me if I don’t link.
Then, Carboanion asks me if my research, which is done from a “gender studies” perspective, is feminist or not. I don’t want to give much detail, but I study domestic violence in fiction. When Carboanion asks me if my research is feminist, she means whether I’m attacking violence against women as a real-life phenomenon, if I show sympathy in favour of women victims, and the like. My answer is that my research is feminist because I’m feminist, but not in the sense she says because I’m researching fiction, not writing a manifesto. I only analyse. I’m not an activist when I’m at the library.
What is the difference between disregarding feminism like my anonymous commenter, and doing Gender Studies the way I do them? And what is the difference between Women’s Studies and Gender Studies? I’ll take a simple example. Barnaby Rudge is a minor novel by Charles Dickens with a main character called Mrs Varden, who psychologically abuses her husband.
Until about twenty years ago, research on this novel pretended Mrs Varden didn’t exist. This author’s analysis of Barnaby Rudge simply excludes the four main female characters except for a few minor details that he needs to mention in order to better describe three of the male ones.
A feminist in Carboanion’s sense would explain Mrs Varden as either a product of a misogynistic Dickens, “Women are not really as nasty as Mrs Varden”, which is not true. Or she would explain that Mrs Varden is a victim of the circumstances, that she is nasty because she is unhappy (true) and that men have made her unhappy (maybe true).
Someone doing Women’s Studies would go a little bit beyond the feminist and maybe analyse the relationship between Mrs Varden and other women in the book, and with women in the real world. Does Mrs Varden behave like a historian or a psychiatrist say women in her position do? The Women’s Studies expert would not necessarily behave as if Mrs Varden had to be defended or excused, and that would be the biggest difference between this one and the feminist-in-Carboanion’s-sense.
Someone doing Gender Studies would also analyse Mrs Varden’s husband.
So, contrary to what my anonymous commenter said, doing Gender Studies, or Women’s Studies, or Queer Studies, is not discriminating: it just adds to everything else. Literary criticism as it was done thirty years ago is not simply discriminatory, it’s incomplete.
11/05/2005
Is it possible to teach Creative Writing?
This post belongs both in this category and in Culture Shock, but anyway.
In some American Universities, it is possible to study Creative Writing as a degree, sometimes as a minor, or as an MFA (Master in Fine Arts) program. I first knew about that through the opinion of an English Literature professor in Spain; he said that those programs teach people how to write according to rules. He made it sound like a terribly uncreative process.
There is an MFA program here at Cornell. I attended the final reading a couple days ago, where five people read fragments of their novels (or very short stories), and four people read poems. I only really enjoyed one poet (I won't give names in case any of the others ever reads this), and all the fiction writers were enjoyable. They didn't sound like bestsellers writers at all. Misty Urban has published a short story abou a little boy dying of cancer, told from the point of view of his very unlikeable mother, how commercial is that?
I have no idea of what people do in a creative writing group. I can imagine that from the outside they look as if they try to fit all writers into one mould, and that individual styles are sacrificed to some abstract notion of "this is what works". But you know what? nearly all amateurs writers I have read, either poets or storytellers (and believe me, I've read dozens) don't have a personal, unmistakable style. And besides, programs of creative writing are not an evil invention of American universities: historically, poets have got together in coteries, groups,clubs, associations, "schools". There is nothing wrong with commenting on each other's mistakes.
And besides, writing is a craft like any other. In my home university, Fine Arts is a degree (in visual arts: painting, scultpture, that sort of thing), and no one thinks that prevents the artists from finding their own voice. Why not the same for word-artists?
05/05/2005
The Hansel and Gretel Effect (How Not to Write Part 9)
Easy. Very easy. Love and respect punctuation rules. Of course we are supposed to take liberties with punctuation as much as with everything else: writing three pages (or a whole chapter or a whole novel) without full stops, or a telegraphic style with extremely short sentences, all of that is perfectly fine. What is not fine is to use punctuation signs for things that were never meant to be: the most abused punctuation mark is probably the ellipsis, the “…”, which is Spain has the quaint name of “puntos suspensivos”, “suspense full stops”.
This marker can indicate a pause in speech, not in narration, or that a thought or sentence is going to be left unfinished or interrupted. Three dots, like three little crumbs left by Hansel and Gretel, are not a substitute for an “etc” or for a slow reading rhythm. If you want reading to be slow, write long sentences, long paragraphs, and use repetitions, or parallelisms in the syntax. In dialogues, three dots are very useful to indicate pauses, interruptions, and the speech of characters that leave sentences trailing. The worst misuse of the ellipsis is probably the amateur writer’s tendency to suggest the effect of a first-person narrator’s stream of thought by finishing many sentences with dots, especially the ones that are not merely narrative, wishing to give (I imagine) the impression that there are other, deeper thoughts, too subtle for speech, slipping away from the mind or the pen, between those damned three dots. These writers take too seriously the suspense-creating function of the “suspense stop” and think that they can actually convey meaning with them at the expense of writing. The effect is actually repetitive, unpolished, and very unoriginal. In prose, if a sentence can stay meaningful without ellipsis at the end, or if a comma in that position does not change the meaning of the sentence, the dots are not necessary: give the three crumbs back to Hansel, who needs them more than you do.
26/04/2005
The Pamphlet Effect (How not to Write part 8)
Without political literature there’d be no Iliad, Aristophanes, Plato, Milton or picaresque novel*. Denouncing injustice creatively (in fiction, in verse, in drama, in essays) is wonderful. But it’s probably the hardest genre of all because the risk of self-indulgence is higher than ever. Make sure that your ideals are not making up for bad writing. Boring, unoriginal, preachy, clichéd. Like Inga Muscio's A Declaracion of Independence, for example.
Some of the very worst poetry (and some writing, too) I’ve ever read was political, and a common mistake as big as plain bad writing is to tell how the poet feels towards an injustice. Who cares? Never assume that your reader shares your ideology. In fact, never assume that your reader is even familiar with the injustice you are reacting against. What all successful political creative writing does is either to describe the situation with a manipulative appearance of objectivity, or to give a call to action to people who haven’t realised yet of the urgency of the problem, or both. Think of “Blowing in the wind”.
*And without picaresque there would be no Fielding, and without Fielding no Jane Austen, and without Jane Austen the world would be a sad and dreary place.
25/04/2005
The Sweet Seventeen Effect (How Not to Write, part 7)
What is a haiku? Some would say, “a haiku is a poem with seventeen syllables, 5-7-5”. Wrong! Bad! Okay, not bad. Just incomplete. My rules to write haiku are lax, and I will explain why with an example.
Sonnets. Petrarch invented (perfected?) the sonnet form in Italian. With a certain rhyme scheme, the famous “two quartets, two tercets” (4+4+3+3 = 14 lines) that Spanish readers will be familiar with. Later, when the sonnet was imported to England, after quite a lot of experimentation, the best English sonnetists figured out that a “three quartets, one couplet” (4+4+4+2 = 14 lines) structure fitted better into their language and thought. There is the Italian sonnet, and there’s the English sonnet. Not better, not worse.
That means that in Japanese a haiku is 5-7-5 and anything else is not a haiku, but in the Western world we have to make as good use as we can of languages that need more syllables to say anything (and Spanish words have on average twice as many syllables as English ones). So: first of all, a haiku in a Western language does not need to have 5-7-5 syllables. It can have more, it can have less. Say, between 14 and 21.
Now, the important bit: as a natural consequence of the Thereus Effect, a haiku in any language is NOT a haiku if it does not have some sort of natural division in syntax or meaning. At least one, maybe two, so that it can have between two and three lines.
Ezra Pound:
The apparition of those faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Two sentences. The image and the metaphor. One clear division.
Alan Spence:
First warmth of spring.
I feel as if
I have been asleep.
Two sentences. The cause and the feeling. One clear division. (I think lines 2 and 3 should be fused, but anyway).
An uncredited translation of a haiku by Issa:
Where there are humans
You’ll find flies
and Buddhas.
One sentence, but each line is one phrase, so there is no run-on effect. And each line in is violent thematic opposition with the other two.
Spanish writers of haiku, including excellent poets like Mario Benedetti, make a massacre of the form because they try so hard to fit into the 5-7-5 pattern that they sacrifice any other concern to it. A seventeen-syllable-long sentence broken into three chunks is as much as haiku as fourteen lines out of the phone book are a sonnet.
19/04/2005
Erotic Literature
I like to take part in a couple of literary message boards, and in one of them someone said recently "I'm not interested in erotic literature at all. Explicit or not explicit, good or bad. Sex should not be told or read, sex should be practised". This guy is mixing unrelated stuff.
Would we say, "don't read travel literature, travel instead!"? "Don't read love stories, find love!" "don't read murder mysteries, have adventures!" "don't read political literature, go out and be an activist!" Exactly. We don't normally say those things.
Some people think that erotica is written and read as a substitute or complement of sex; it may be so, but that is not its primary function. We could argue forever what is porn and what is erotica, but for artistic purposes, the pornographic function is to arouse sexually; erotica is art that happens to have sex as a theme. "Porn consumed for its artistic qualities rather than its arousing ones". My definition is 100% subjective: porn or erotica are only functions; they are not even qualities. According to my definition, Titanic the movie, for example, has a pornografic function, at least for some people.
So, this guy from the message board is wrong because he took erotica to have an exclusively pornographic function, while it is merely art with a sexual theme. Right?
17/04/2005
The Thereus Effect (How Not To Write Part 6)
This is the biggest problem of free verse; it doesn’t apply to (almost) anything else. Free verse seems easy, but it’s not, among other reasons because it doesn’t have rules. Mistake: it has one!
Read your poem aloud. If the line endings do not naturally correspond to pauses in syntax, intonation, or meaning, or if the lines’ length could be distributed in another way without hurting the meaning of the poem, you have not written a poem; you’ve raped and maimed a piece of poetic prose.
A “broken lines” effect is good, only as long as it is supposed to achieve a particular effect. T. S. Eliot, no less, said that “good verse can never be free” (I’m quoting from memory here, so I might be wrong). You don’t need to make lines coincide with grammatical phrases, but if you break rules, do it to improve the effect. I suggest an experiment: forget about the line endings, write or type the whole thing as a paragraph, and read it again. How does it sound? Good? Good! Welcome to the wonderful world of poetic prose. It didn’t have to be split into little bits to be beautiful, did it?
15/04/2005
Nacho Duato on talent and expression
I adore Nacho Duato, the director and main choreographer of one of Spain's Nationall Ballet Companies. He is in charge of the one that does modern dance. After decades of experience he is beyond trying to please anyone; today he's been interviewed in
El Pais and as usual he says interesting things about art and how to express it. I can't link to the original interview because it works by subscription.
P. Entonces, ese talento natural no basta...
R. No. El talento te lo tienes que buscar. Cuando vivía en Holanda, mis amigos se iban de discotecas cada fin de semana. Yo me quedaba estudiando. También iba a las discotecas, claro, pero menos. Los bailarines dejamos los estudios muy pronto y por eso tenemos que esforzarnos mucho más. Tenemos que prepararnos. Quizá tengo talento para la danza, pero lo más importante es que ese talento no se te escape. A veces es preferible la convicción al talento.
Q: So, natural talent is not enough...
A: No, it's not. Your talent is something you have to look for. When I was living in the Netherlands, my friends went clubbing every weekend. I stayed at home and studied. I went o the discos, of course, but not often. Dancers have to give up their studies soon and that's why we should work a lot harder. We have to get ready. I might have natural talent for dancing, but the most important thing is not letting that talent slip away from you. Sometimes, conviction is better than talent.
The Góngora Effect (How Not To Write 5)
This makes a lot more sense when talking of writing in Spanish, but I’ll do my best to make it understandable.
Góngora was an excellent poet, maybe a cultural equivalent of John Donne. The problem is that he used such convoluted syntax that nowadays we need a footnote translation into plain Spanish.
Literary language does not have to be harder than the non-literary. You don’t need to make sentences longer than usual. A difficult word order (in languages that are more flexible than English) is very, very tricky. Use tricks if you want to, but never think that your writing is better if the syntax is different from that of expository writing. One test is to read your work aloud and see if the natural pauses you need to make to breathe coincide with punctuation marks. A second test would be asking yourself why have you “broken the rules”. If there’s no answer, or it is nothing more specific than “it sounds better like that” “it sounds different from prose”, “just because”, mend it. The most obvious example I know of useless changes to word order is the Spanish epithet, so I will go on in that language.
No soporto, de verdad que no soporto los adjetivos colocados antes del nombre cuando no son estrictamente necesarios. Por ejemplo, Neruda sabe lo que hace cuando dice:
"Cuerpo de mujer, blancas colinas, muslos blancos”.
Para empezar, está jugando con el ritmo de la frase, y para seguir, el blanco lo rodea todo. Es un “blanco cuerpo blanco”. Hay una razón ahí. Lo que no entiendo es porqué a estas alturas hay gente que piensa que para que la poesía sea poesía es necesario anteponer los adjetivos por las buenas. Esto no es el Siglo de Oro y hacerle esguinces a la sintaxis hace siglos que ya no sube puntos. Neruda lo sabía y por eso decía “puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche”, ni “los más tristes versos” ni tonterías. La canción desesperada es una canción desesperada. No es una desesperada canción, y menos mal.
11/04/2005
The Beatles Effect (How Not To Write, part 4)
I like The Beatles. They’re fun. Sometimes they were good. And they were the kings of the bad rhyme. The Beatles effect is what happens when you care about rhyme so much that it destroys your poem.
I don’t have anything against rhyme. As long as it’s good. Don’t rhyme “-ing” forms, don’t rhyme “be” and “me”, “you” and “do”. If you cannot find better rhymes, and you still like very traditional forms of poetry, write blank verse. If Milton wrote Paradise Lost in blank verse, it should be good enough for you.
¿Estás leyendo esto en español? Al español el verso blanco no le pega tanto como al inglés, pero antes que rimar participios e infinitivos, siempre será mejor la rima asonante. El romancero tradicional le da cien mil vueltas a las rimas facilonas.
09/04/2005
The Therapy Effect
Therapy should remain between you and your therapist. I am not your therapist. If you write to vent things out, good. That’s fantastic. Just don’t show it to anyone else later. I like the Elusive Poet (I mean as a person) because he doesn’t go around rubbing our noses into his feelings. Thank you, Poet.
I’ll say that again in case it’s not clear: writing is great, but showing it to others is not always so. I know people who think that since creative writing is very hard (or because they say they have no talent for it) they can only admire, never criticise or comment, on amateur work. Wrong. Amateurs are to be praised for trying, and then dissected if they dare showing their work in public. It is part of the process (am I being arrogant? Sure, but I’m fair. The comments section is there, and I’d love any feedback on my poetry).
Every time I write a therapeutic piece, something to help me get rid of a feeling, I tell myself I will hate it in two weeks. Then I put it into the quarantine folder and when some time has passed, I go back to it, thinking I will hate it. The prose is always horrible, no exceptions; most of the poetry can be saved with a bit of editing.
Of course I don’t mean that any poetry written “therapeutically” or anything that deals with very personal feelings is necessarily bad. But writing, like any craft, tends to need polishing, and it is harder to have the necessary distance when writing about our own emotions while they are still fresh. We all love our own feelings and it is very hard to see them, and the art they inspire, as different things.
07/04/2005
The Almudena Grandes effect (How Not to Write 2)
I’m being a bit unfair because as time goes by, Grandes writes better and better, but there we go. Almudena Grandes is a Spanish novelist. As far as I’ve read, all her novels have first person narrators: one of them has four alternating narrators (each narrator a chapter). The problem is that all her narrators, all of them, even the four women in Atlas de Geografía Humana, have the exact same voice.
If you are going to write narrative, please don’t make a teenager and his grandmother use the same register. Don’t be Almudena Grandes and don’t make your readers confused about who is telling what. The moment one of my characters opens his or her mouth, I want the reader to know who’s talking.
Someone criticised my short stories because the female characters are far more articulate than the male ones. I don’t do that on purpose, and I don’t think my women are better or more intelligent/educated than my men; it simply came naturally to make the women resemble me, but with a more ornate expression. The men are a bit like some of my male friends, precisely the ones who express themselves very differently from me. All I have been able to manage so far is to make characters that don’t have all the same voice, although I don’t think my dialogue is good.
06/04/2005
The T. S. Eliot effect (How Not To Write, 1)
I am going to repeat myself here. Every artist that has stopped to theorise about
the creative process, about
What Art Ought to Be, reaches a simple and easy conclusion.
Art ought to be what I do. Of course, I have no intention of being an exception. When I have written about why I like what I like, the result has been in the negative: instead of a list of things to do, I have a list of things that kill poetry. When I write (poetry or prose: it doesn’t matter) there are a few things I always try to avoid. Good writing is often a matter of leaving things out; most of the stuff I’ve read by bad or mediocre writers was so because of what was superfluous, not because of what was missing.
It probably sounds destructive, but in the hope of offending someone (oh yes, please, disagree), I’m going to blog a number of “effects”, flaws to be avoided like the plague. This is the first one: the T. S. Eliot effect is a double-edged sword. It is impossible to write without having influences. Really impossible. Sometimes those influences are evident, sometimes less so. Influences are good. But if your work has influences that are both obvious _and_ obviously better than your creations, be careful. T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland is a poem I used to hate because it screams
I WANT TO BE DANTE BUT I’M NOT GOOD ENOUGH. And what’s the point of that?
(Brought to you by the composer of haikus who has stolen quotes straight out of Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, Pink Floyd, Beowulf, William Butler Yeats and Amaral).
17/03/2005
The Creative Process is an Oedipal triangle.
Some literary critics, like
Harold Bloom, say that the creative impulse is the wish of outshining your influences. It’s very Oedipal: the artist is the child, the influence is the father, and Art is the mother. Yes: you want to kill your father and
possess your mother. It would be more appealing if it wasn’t such a male-oriented scheme.
Regarding poetry, that Oedipal triangle is exactly the way I feel. I often write because somebody got there first and said it better than I could. I used to despise T.S. Eliot’s
The Wasteland because in each line I read “I want to be Dante, and I can’t”. My own personal list of Dantes is a long one, but we could start with e. e.cummings. I have posted this poem before, but it won't hurt you to read it again, and besides now it comes with a Spanish translation.
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, misteriously) her first rose
or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands algún lugar por el que nunca he viajado, felizmente más allá
de toda experiencia, tus ojos tienen su silencio:
en el más débil gesto tuyo hay cosas que me engloban,
o que no puedo tocar porque están demasiado cerca
tu menor mirada fácilmente me descerrará
aun si me he cerrado a mí mismo como a dedos,
tú me abres siempre pétalo a pétalo como la Primavera abre
(tocando hábilmente, misteriosamente) su primera rosa
o si es tu deseo cerrarme, yo y
mi vida nos cerraremos espléndidamente, de repente,
como cuando el corazón de esta flor imagina
la nieve cuidadosamente en todas partes cayendo;
nada que podamos percibir en este mundo iguala
el poder de tu intensa fragilidad: cuya textura
me incita con el color de sus países,
representando la muerte y el parasiempre con cada aliento
(no sé qué es lo que tienes que cierra
y abre; sólo algo en mí entiende
que la voz de tus ojos es más profunda que todas las rosas)
nadie, ni siquiera la lluvia, tiene unas manitas tan pequeñas.
Poetry and feelings
I say that I don’t like exhibitionism in poetry. Mar says that all literature is somehow exhibitionist, since I want my works to be read. The easiest way of explaining where is our disagreement is that my exhibitionism is “Look! Look what I wrote!” while the exhibitionism that I dislike goes “Look! These are my feelings! I wrote a poem about them, too!” Writing poetry about your own feelings is great. Showing it to others is often embarrassing.
But Mar’s comment prompts me to talk of something I had meant to for a while. A famous definition of poetry in Wordsworth’s:
Poetry is the overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquillity.
La poesía son sentimientos intensos y descontrolados, rememorados en calma.
Our friend Wordsworth, a bit of a sentimental Romantic (not as bad as Bécquer, though), identified poetry with lyrical poetry. Evidently, the Iliad is poetry, but it doesn’t count. Verse satire doesn’t count either. And so on. So we are left with lyrical poetry, including religious poetry too. The powerful feelings: it assumes you have powerful feelings. Can detached people write good poetry? Can you write, for example, good love poetry if you are not in love, or even in you have never been? My answer would be yes. It seems that for Wordsworth, lyrical poetry has to be autobiographical: if it was so, he was wrong. Who the hell cares if Garcilaso’s Elisa (reading in English? Elisa is the Spanish equivalent of Stella, from Astrophel and Stella) was based on a flesh-and-bone woman? Who cares if I wrote a poem in the first person about a friend’s feelings?
I’m being too hard on poor Wordsworth. Lyrical poetry needs feeling after all. Then there is the second part: recollected in tranquillity. Hey, that’s like haikus! You have a powerful experience, whatever it is. “Recollected in tranquillity” means that your feeling becomes poetry by treating it with care and a bit of discipline. It is not enough to just throw it on the page. I call “exhibitionist” the poetry that I dislike because it is both confessional, intimate (in Spanish I would say “intimista”) and at the same time too simple, too unoriginal, bad in some way that makes me think that the main purpose of the poet was to get their feelings written down rather than creating something special and separate from himself or herself.
16/03/2005
There are three types of artists
Cartoons drawn in the back of business cards.There are three ways of being creative. I don’t mean ways of creating, since those are nearly infinite. I mean there are three ways of being a creative person. I know three people that exemplify each way.
The Elusive Poet writes poetry. It is personal, hard to understand, and surrealist. It is very important to him but no one is allowed to read it; sometimes he'll recite a bit to a very close friend. What is important to him is creation. Plenty of people create so that they can “let out” something trapped inside; of course the results can be too personal to show.
My second example is a rapper. Spanish rap has a tiny but fanatical audience, apart from the yearly sudden success created by the whims of the record companies. Toteking has published 2 CDs,
one with his brother and the other one
solo. Some of his lyrics are personal, some aren’t, and in many, content is next to irrelevant (as opposed to form, which is everything). I haven’t seen him in ages, but as far as I know, he's given at least one concert if not more every week of the last three years. He despises the attitude of creative people who don't try to make money out of their art, which is why he said I should write a novel instead of short stories and poetry. To him everyone who does not try to make a profit from their creativity is either very stupid, or hypocritical, o snobbish. I wonder in which category he puts me.
I don't think either of them is wrong. Guy One enjoys what he does and no one these days is going to become suddenly rich by publishing poetry. Tote has lots of fun, and a bit of money is never a bad thing. Now the third example. That’s me. I don’t know or care if I can make money with what I do. I don’t know very well why I do it. What I do know is that I need it to be seen. I work a lot better and faster with audience and feedback, even if it is negative. Sometimes as I write I think, "is this good enough to show to this or that person?" Other times, someone’s comments on my work inspires even more work.
That's one of the reasons to blog: It seems a wonderful way to let others read me. And you can just click there and say anything, from “your haikus are trash” or recommendations or critiques or anything. Like a public poetry reading without the snobbery (I hope) and the free food (but if you live in Ithaca, that can be fixed: do you want to go out for lunch sometime? Heh).
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