I went to a craft talk this morning with our visiting poet, Rosanna Warren. Although I know nothing about an iamb or a couplet, she said some pretty interesting things about art in general. One of them being how we now live in this confessional culture, where we believe people should care about everything we think or say, but how these rants and ramblings (and ahem, blogs) don't necessarily make Art. And while I'm sure there are bloggers and YouTubers out there who could rattle off numerous arguments about what constitutes art (and have done so many, many times because this argument is not new), this one point is indisputable: Not everything we say or do is worth reading or listening to.
To paraphrase Warren, art has to start with truthfulness, but we don't know why those truths should matter until we create a story.
Here's a few lines from the poem "Symptoms" by Robert Lowell. While I'm no poetry scholar, I'm convinced that the man can turn confession into art by using honesty and imagery (the physical contradictions of dolphins) to describe his struggle with manic depression:
I feel my old infection, it comes once yearly:
lowered good humor, then an ominous
rise of irritable enthusiasm....
Three dolphins bear our little toilet-stand,
the grin of the eyes rebukes the scowl of the lips,
they are crazy with the thirst. I soak,
examining and then examining
what I really have against myself.
Writing careful, poignant lines like these is a lifetime aspiration and a daily challenge. It's the reason why I write.
So to defend what I'm doing at this very moment, all I can say is I'm not sure what I'm doing. Right now, the blog's serving as a travel log, my test run at this whole blogging thing. While I'd like to focus it on words, beautiful words, meaningful words, other people's words, humorous words, relatable words, not-taking-myself-too-seriously words, for now, it's the gray area between a journal entry, or maybe a conversation, and something slightly more composed, or just edited more closely. But it's definitely not Art. You can't rush discovery.
** (Rereading this last paragraph now, nothing sounds more confessional, or skitzophrenic, than all that rambling. Sorry.)
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