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robert creeley, closed cultural groups, and open networks
The Creeley reading was pretty amazing. He struck me, charmingly, as a person who is utterly bewildered by having produced the work that he's produced: he reiterated several times that he doesn't have a clear sense of what his own poems mean, or even that he himself is genuinely the author of them. He suggested that writing exists outside of one's self, and then comes into the world by being sort of channeled through the artist, who may exert no more intentionality than just sort of stepping aside.
From my notes:
"Writing is as much how do you get to it, how do you find your way to it—once you get to it there's no problem."
"One thinks that because one wrote something that one wrote it—not so simple!"
This seems in accord with what Sluk wrote about ideas coming from the unconscious mind—if I train myself, as a writer, to "find" my unconscious / let those unconscious intuitions through (harder than it sounds), then, in a very real way, "I" did not write the poem (if we take "I" to mean the bundled assertions / beliefs / strategies / whatever that constitute my conscious self).
There's another interesting thing that Creeley does that I still can't quite put my finger on: something to do with the way he freeley uses words that other poets might reject as banal or exhausted. There's an argument that I want to make here about individual words as "machines" ("micropoems?") and Creeley poems, aware of words functioning on this level, operate as assemblages of these independent units—but then I wonder if I'm not thinking too hard about it.
I also enjoyed the reading because I knew a lot of the people there... people I know from UIC; people familiar from Discrete Series events; people I met in Arizona during my UIC days who are now in Chicago. Going to an event an recognizing a fair percentage of the crowd always gives me a good feeling, there's something vaguely communal about it. Or maybe it is recognizing my membership in a closed cultural group.
Or is it so closed after all? I've grown really interested, lately, in how the Internet is affecting contemporary poetic culture. The Internet is enabling a national (international probably) discussion among poets on a scale that has not really been seen before—we could say it is intensifying the culture. But we could also say (arguably) that it is opening the culture to outsiders: the Internet is, after all, an open network.
Poetic culture, in the past, could perhaps be described as an invisible college, a "group of peers ... who band around a shared interest" (thanks to Black Belt Jones for my introduction to this concept).
The Internet turns invisible colleges into what people are calling "echo chambers": social networks which allow like-minded people to come together to agree (or to argue).
As you might guess from the pejorative name, echo chambers are often critiqued as being insular spaces, feedback systems where all of the participants mutually reinforce one another to the point of myopia. But others point out that since echo chambers operate within an architecture which is accessible and open, other people can look in, comment, and critique, injecting a heterogeneous element that keeps the system evolving...
Tools for thought, anyway. Labels: poetry_commentary, writing |
Friday, April 02, 2004
11:06 AM
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