Comments on: Writing and Failure (Part 4)

By: scott

scott — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 23:37:27 +0000

I believe that a future audience is much more plausible than a past one, at the time of conjecture. A future viewpoint is almost inevitable. I believe that someone will read this tomorrow. There is nothing crazy there. I have read you several hours after you posted your comment, for instance. I’m am therefore your future reader, the one you imagined at the time of your writingl. The timestamp verifies this for me. Your writing is not timeless, but rather dated. Your writing is past. My response was the part of the future of yours but whoops, now it is past.
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By: Joseph Hutchison

Joseph Hutchison — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 22:11:32 +0000

I fail to understand your obsession with critics. The days when any critic can validate a poem, much less a poet, for a believing public are long gone—and good riddance. (Sorry, Cynthia O.!) What you seem to want to avoid is the question of readers. I mean all readers, of course: people who buy books, people who read them in libraries, and other poets (even if they moonlight as critics). If you can put forward a coherent approach for readers to take in “testing the merits” of an avant-garde work, please do. Of course, when the maker makes the rules for evaluating his own creation, we must be forgiven for being suspicious of the test.
I have to add that your observations about “untimeliness” make no sense to me. ALL poetry is “of its time”; what else could it be? When you write about “the poet arriving on the scene either too soon or too late to feel at ease,” you’re talking about the psychological situation of the poet, and that has nothing to do with “the times.” Such poets may become so ill at ease that they invent for themselves a “future audience” as a mechanism for helping them write: I have no problem with that; every writer resorts to favorite headgames now and then. And I can’t object if the headgame involves the fantasy of speaking “from a future viewpoint.” But I don’t imagine you seriously expect any rational person to believe that the “future audience” or the “future viewpoint” are real. That would be … well … kind of crazy.
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By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 11:18:24 +0000

- but have you confronted some of the paradoxes? A mode of activity that can so completely rationalize, explain, defend, justify itself, has already institutionalized itself. And in fact there are many social &/or academic organizations which will support, fund and glorify avant-garde pomposity.
Here’s another paradox : the PROCESS of experiment provides a crutch for the avant-garde artist : sort of a ready-made justification of an activity-for-its-own-sake, rather than of the mysterious alterity of the art-work, which is the supposed goal of the artist.
Art and beauty are actually more difficult than the difficult rationalizations offered by the experimentalist. Perhaps that’s the hard reality which motivates all such futile attempts at justification.
Ars est celare artem.
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