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On Poetry and Culture Shock

The Creative Process

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

There are three types of artists

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).