Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Friday, 26 October 2007
"The metaphor of childbirth which never seems to die." A poem, a play, is the chronicle of a perception: not the perception itself (which may be trite or complex, commonplace or rare, selfserving or altruistic), but a chronology of its emergence. This is how it exists in time, from beginning to end, and like birth, it is experience, not product. The poem describes it, its contours, as means of communicating its content.
The poem is procedure. The greatest task of the poet is discipline and care, not to write (or, at least, not merely write, and in this golden age of literacy everyone can), but to time, precision and specificity: to try to get it right the first time. Like an obstetrics manual, the poem must describe accurately, carefully, without baroque augmentation or unnecessary linguistic spectacle, the means to the expression of that unique perception. (In the realm of poetry and drama, spelling counts; one can't abuse or disregard the tools of expression without exposing our ignorance of their power, our lack of respect for written communication itself and those whom we're addressing, and the possibilities of experience words invite.) An obstetrics manual which indulges in platitude or moralism is quite as useless as a poem which does the same (at least, the poem's uselessness, if we take it as a given, is squared). At worst, inaccuracy and slop in the description can lead to death, of the child and its mother, or of the perception.
At any rate, and in any case, description can only follow experience; no amount of imagination, of frill, will be worthwhile if it is not grounded in direct perception. A poet might describe his own birth, but only if he has courageously sought it, and then that perception remains his own perception. He can only tell how he got there. The pain and the wound, too, remain his own. He cannot share, he cannot express, the self. "Self-expression" is not only meaningless, but, in the realm of art, impossible. Self is expressed in life, not in art. He can only instruct in the means of finding and exploring one's own.
Posted at 1.33 pm in /Organum
Permanent link to this story
Friday, 26 October 2007
The fundamental experience of the writer is helplessness. This does not mean to distinguish writing from being alive: it means to correct the fantasy that creative work is an ongoing record of the triumph of volition, that the writer is someone who has the good luck to be able to do what he or she wishes to do: to confidently and regularly imprint his being to a sheet of paper. But writing is not decanting of personality. And most writers spend much of their time various kinds of torment: wanting to write, being unable to write; wanting to write differently, being unable to write differently. In a whole lifetime, years are spent waiting to be claimed by an idea. The only real exercise of will is negative: we have toward what we write the power of veto.
It is a life dignified, I think, by yearning, not made serene by sensations of achievement. In the actual work, a discipline, a service. Or, to utilize the metaphor of childbirth which never seems to die: the writer is the one who attends, who facilitates: the doctor, the midwife, not the mother.
Louise Gluck
"Education of the Poet"
Proofs and Theories
Ecco Press, 1994
Posted at 9.42 am in /Quotes
Permanent link to this story
