beauty
Don't want to be contentious, and don't want to make my writing look all fuzzy edged, but I think what unifies my current work with what I was doing in '96, and what I was doing in '93 when I was imitating Keats badly, is beauty. The emphasis, the way I approach beauty has altered, and I hope for the better. The key is in a quote from American artist Richard Serra, 'Always assume your audience is smarter than you.' Apologies if that's not wholly accurate, I'm quoting from memory. It has to be said I've always been poor at trusting my audience, rather tending toward the didactic. But I believe I'm improving.
To attempt to explain how beauty unifies my work I'm going to split this discussion into three sections: 1993, the year I was following traditional models most closely; 1996, the year I started to free myself up as a writer; and 2004, where I'm at presently.
1993
In this initial phase beauty was something drawn from nature, it was something for poets to imitate and try to capture. Beauty explicitly for me at this time excluded anything manmade. Perhaps perversely my response to this was to accept the tradition of highly formal verse and diction. Both characteristics were odd given that when I set out I'd written about whatever pleased me, however I chose, and wanted poetry to be indistinguishable from prose to be indistinguishable from music and so on. Anyway, that's a bit of an aside. Now, by contrast, beauty was only in nature, and the way to treat both was in structured verse that was as 'timeless' as possible.
My writing was awful. Influenced by Keats, Shelley and Byron I was producing overblown, incoherent poetry about nature and (notionally) the cruelty and injustice of humanity. I was stuck poetically and politically in the early 19th century.
1996
There's a lot of history to be written about 1996 but this isn't really the time. In capsule I abandoned conventional subjects, formal structures and efforts to make my verse polished. Although there had already been a loosening in my work, suddenly I was being much truer to myself. Now the emphasis was on celebrating beauty wherever I found it. Keen readers will have noticed I used celebration in a similar context in an earlier post. This is because it was a key concept in what I was doing at that time. A word I kept coming back to in my head if not my poetry.
Beauty was found in a variety of situations and not just the picturesque or Romantic locations familiar in old-fashioned art. It was in light flashing off cars, pools of vomit, people slipping over, loud noises resonating off windows. A whole range of everyday situations, perhaps unexpected as focii of beauty. I didn't really trust my audience enough yet, and still felt the need to explain what I was doing.
The concept of beauty was wider, the means of expressing that beauty were wider, but the beauty itself was still there.
2004
It's more difficult to write about my current work as I'm still engaged with it, but I have noticed that beauty remains a core idea. I'm still a little prone to try and direct readers who are well capable of understanding me. However in the better of my pieces over the last couple of months I think I've allowed more room for them to make their own interpretations.
I think some of my current pieces allow me to show the beauty in the city, and in the wider world, by partially imitating it. I isolate, only slightly order, and present in unfamiliar form, things which surround us every day. I wouldn't claim to be the first to have noticed this beauty, or to be the first to set it down as 'art', but I hope my contribution adds something new. I'd be happiest if I inspired someone else to try and write, to see what they can discover.
Where I can go from here I'm not sure, although returning to the Richard Serra quote I still need to give my audience a little more space. My problem is that my work tends to see-saw between the political/ethical/social and the aesthetic/celebratory. But this is starting to move into another argument which I'll be posting here in the next couple of days.
To attempt to explain how beauty unifies my work I'm going to split this discussion into three sections: 1993, the year I was following traditional models most closely; 1996, the year I started to free myself up as a writer; and 2004, where I'm at presently.
1993
In this initial phase beauty was something drawn from nature, it was something for poets to imitate and try to capture. Beauty explicitly for me at this time excluded anything manmade. Perhaps perversely my response to this was to accept the tradition of highly formal verse and diction. Both characteristics were odd given that when I set out I'd written about whatever pleased me, however I chose, and wanted poetry to be indistinguishable from prose to be indistinguishable from music and so on. Anyway, that's a bit of an aside. Now, by contrast, beauty was only in nature, and the way to treat both was in structured verse that was as 'timeless' as possible.
My writing was awful. Influenced by Keats, Shelley and Byron I was producing overblown, incoherent poetry about nature and (notionally) the cruelty and injustice of humanity. I was stuck poetically and politically in the early 19th century.
1996
There's a lot of history to be written about 1996 but this isn't really the time. In capsule I abandoned conventional subjects, formal structures and efforts to make my verse polished. Although there had already been a loosening in my work, suddenly I was being much truer to myself. Now the emphasis was on celebrating beauty wherever I found it. Keen readers will have noticed I used celebration in a similar context in an earlier post. This is because it was a key concept in what I was doing at that time. A word I kept coming back to in my head if not my poetry.
Beauty was found in a variety of situations and not just the picturesque or Romantic locations familiar in old-fashioned art. It was in light flashing off cars, pools of vomit, people slipping over, loud noises resonating off windows. A whole range of everyday situations, perhaps unexpected as focii of beauty. I didn't really trust my audience enough yet, and still felt the need to explain what I was doing.
The concept of beauty was wider, the means of expressing that beauty were wider, but the beauty itself was still there.
2004
It's more difficult to write about my current work as I'm still engaged with it, but I have noticed that beauty remains a core idea. I'm still a little prone to try and direct readers who are well capable of understanding me. However in the better of my pieces over the last couple of months I think I've allowed more room for them to make their own interpretations.
I think some of my current pieces allow me to show the beauty in the city, and in the wider world, by partially imitating it. I isolate, only slightly order, and present in unfamiliar form, things which surround us every day. I wouldn't claim to be the first to have noticed this beauty, or to be the first to set it down as 'art', but I hope my contribution adds something new. I'd be happiest if I inspired someone else to try and write, to see what they can discover.
Where I can go from here I'm not sure, although returning to the Richard Serra quote I still need to give my audience a little more space. My problem is that my work tends to see-saw between the political/ethical/social and the aesthetic/celebratory. But this is starting to move into another argument which I'll be posting here in the next couple of days.
Comments