When I was a young cook, I followed a blog called Ideas in Food. The two writers of the blog were a husband and wife team who had previously worked in various interesting restaurants and were then doing private events. This was when both ‘molecular gastronomy’ and blogging were in vogue.
Out of all the many cooking blogs at the time, the content in Ideas in Food was probably the most consistently innovative. And they published something new nearly every day. Fine dining cooks at the time would read the most recent Ideas blog entry at home after their shift and then discuss it together the next day, or use an idea they had found there in developing a new dish.
What impressed me most at the time was the motto of the blog: ‘Ideas are free.’ I know that they made money through links on their site. Eventually they published a cookbook containing some of the ideas they had first written about in their blog. But their attitude towards sharing their discoveries with anyone who happened to have access to the internet was radically different from the attitude I found among some chefs I worked for, who instead insisted on secrecy. Many chefs will not share certain recipes with others, even those they work with.
I realized that those chefs who were secretive were the ones who had few ideas of their own. And that often the recipes they hid were those they had taken from others. It is true that there are those who will reproduce someone else’s dish and call it theirs. Just as there are artists and writers who might copy or plagiarize the work of another artist or writer. There are rock musicians that became millionaires by essentially rewriting the songs of poor blues musicians of a previous generation, and never giving those musicians any financial compensation or credit. Those same rock musicians will now sue anyone who song too closely resembles their own, as we have seen with the Rolling Stones.
It may be that the very idea of copyright does much to impoverish art. If you are a truly creative person, with many ideas of your own, why be upset if someone takes one of your ideas and develops their own interpretation of it? Particularly if they give you credit? In our time of instant access and social media, I would hope that someone blatantly copying someone else will eventually be found out.
For myself, I would rather be part of a group of people that are freely sharing ideas than to consider everything I produce as a potential commodity. What might have happened if copyright laws were stronger in Elizabethan England? What if Shakespeare had not been able to employ Marlowe’s ‘mighty line’, and used a multiplicity of sources to develop his plays? We would be bereft of perhaps the greatest body of work in the history of English literature.
It might be argued that, with Shakespeare’s talent, he would developed his own ideas. It is difficult to argue about what might have been. But it is easy to ask what Ulysses by Joyce would have been without Homer. Or what The Wasteland would have been without Dante. Or what The Divine Comedy would have been without Virgil. Or what The Aeneid might have been without Homer’s work. And Homer himself, if he did exist: did he make up all those stories about the gods? Did he create the characters of the gods themselves? What if Whitman had sued other poets when they began to write in free verse?
Isn’t it the work of others that inspires us to create our own? How many actual words does the average writer create? Did Keith Richards discover a new way of playing the guitar, that he should be so possessive of a particular riff?
The problem, of course, is the seeming necessity for commodification. There is nothing I would love more than to have the money to get the best education, hire an agent and a publicist, and dedicate myself to writing full time. I know that many contemporary famous poets have done exactly that. Anyone, to be good at what they do, needs talent and dedication. But money gives someone the time and resources to develop talent and allow apply their dedication. How many nights have I only had time to scribble a few lines in a notebook at 1:30 in the morning after finally getting home from a twelve- to fourteen-hour shift?
I read a tweet by a well-known poet recently that said “I know there are some poets that can’t afford publicists.” Yes—some poets. Yesterday I saw the website of another poet I admire, who releases content exactly like that which I compose in this ‘notebook’—but only to those who are paid subscribers. It may be that when it comes time to renew my website in the spring that I won’t have the money to do so. But I’m not going to make people pay for what I hope is only one side of a conversation. I don’t want anyone to copy me. But I would love to speak, I love to be heard, and I especially love others to reply. Ideas are free.
One of the indicators of a great writer, for me, is in the deliberateness of their word choices. In those places where others would rely on words that are commonly used, a great writer chooses words that are simultaneously surprising and precise.
I wrote almost entirely in traditional forms until I was around twenty-one. This was wonderful training for my sense of rhythm in a poem, which is a quality that poets who grew up writing only in free verse sometimes have difficulty with.
Now I rarely write in traditional forms, but I do love to engage with them. I want to write not in the tradition, but in the post-tradition. I want the reader to see not a sonnet, but the ghost of a sonnet, hovering behind the page.
To restrict people to writing only from the place of their social position would diminish literature more than any other censorship program could ever achieve. And to diminish literature is to radically diminish the potentiality of human empathy.
The Ideal Ego, according to Lacan, promises a future wholeness. This promise is what sustains the Ego. In my experience, however, it is the Ideal which most frustrates people.
Nietzsche said, “Happiness is the feeling that power is growing.” As usual Nietzsche stated this in a way meant to shock Christian propriety. But the statement is worth examining for what it might mean to us.
Perhaps it means that when a person feels they are moving towards an ideal, towards the mythic sense of wholeness, this what we usually call “happiness”. In an era that defines itself by progress, we naturally consider our worth by our sense of personal progress. The subtle intent of the usual greeting of ‘How are you/How’s it going’ may be to ascertain how someone is progressing towards their ideal. Who are the people that others most often admire? Those who have overcome challenges, those who have worked to achieve some sort of mastery, those who have “progressed” the most.
The issue of depression is of course extremely complex, but many of the people I have known who have suffered from depression do so because they despair over how they have failed to achieve their ideal, or feel that ideal is unachievable. Or they cannot articulate an ideal, but presume it must exist, as it is one of the foundational myths of our culture.
It might be said that this is a privileged position to assume, believing that it is only our inward circumstances that cause depression. Part of the issue here, I think, is an issue with nomenclature. We say ‘oh, that’s depressing’ about anything saddening. Clinical depression can indeed be caused by living circumstances, by horrible events in a person’s life. But there are many who live in challenging circumstances that are able to resist clinical depression. Just as there are those whose lives, from the perspective of social norms, have been successful, who unexpectedly decide to end their own lives.
Our work allows us to subsume our ego in the relative success of our workplace. We can use various technologies to distract us from our ego. We can try to merge our ego with that of a community. Or take drugs that allow us to briefly feel as if our ideal has been achieved. Uppers can make us think more of ourselves. Downers can make us more attracted to everything around us. That’s why the comedown from drugs can be so devastating: as our dopamine abandons us, we recognize how false those feelings were, and how far we remain from our ideal.
Regarding these recognitions, we can assume the pragmatic approach of William James: whether or not what we dedicate ourselves to is ‘true’, it can still be valid as a method of living. But must we merely attempt to adjust ourselves to the concept of progress which our culture dictates to us, and then hopefully discover a way to circumvent that concept?
There is another statement of Nietzsche to consider here: “Be loyal to the earth.” In the context of what he was discussing, I think he meant that we should refuse any hope for a life after death, one that would make this life valid only as a means of testing ourselves for that afterlife. But we can apply this idea to any consideration of ideality—from our progress towards mastery, to our our relative social success, to the Platonic Forms, and the hope for Heaven.
We are being trained to be anxious. When we are anxious we develop dependencies. When we develop dependencies we can no longer be independent. Then our only hopes are to buy our way to momentary release or to wait for someone to release us, whether that be a perfect lover, a demagogue, or a messiah.
What has helped me the most in dealing with my own depression is refusing both anticipation and regret. These feelings arise when considering how we are hoping to achieve or have failed to achieve our ideal. When I abandon the pursuit of happiness, I allow myself to be happy.
Throughout the 2021-2022 school year, 1600 book titles were banned according to a new report by PEN America.
For many poets it seems that a poem is troubled into its making. There was some disturbance that needed the poem to correct it, or wound that needed to be bandaged, or terror that needed to be calmed. To me, poetry seems an extension of being. What is more natural than creativity? We are given poetry when we are given language. Every elegy is a commemoration. I hope to celebrate every self. Singing is not only a form of healing.
Saying a haiku should adhere to some buddhist ideal is like saying a sonnet should be about unrequited love.
What is the ‘purpose’ of poetry?
First I think it essential to ask why we must demand a utilitarian function from every aesthetic practice and object.
For myself poets act, in Lyotard’s phrase, as ‘witnesses of the unrepresentable’. Of course, because what they offer is not immediately quantifiable in market terms, poetry is assigned little to no value by those who insist on such terms.
Sade was correct in his prediction following the Revolution that unless the French refuted Christianity, the monarchy would return. The institution of the Church and that of the Monarchy were too inextricably connected for one to persist without the return of the other.
Chomsky
The condemnation of Chomsky for his comments concerning the war in Ukraine is a perfect example of how censorship operates in the US. They seem to have missed him calling the Russian invasion a major war crime. There have been many instances of those who have not read his actual statements repudiating him and his work. Those who have done this have internalized the narrative established by the US, and cannot accept any criticism of that narrative. In the repudiation of Chomsky himself we can also witness the increased use of ad hominem arguments, which have become increasingly popular since Trump assumed office. This is ironic, of course, considering many of the people making these arguments identify as liberal. As to Chomsky’s credentials to speak on political matters, he has been deeply involved in analyzing and writing about politics for over 60 years.
I am about halfway through My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe. I did not know criticism could be written in such a way. Reading it, I have that feeling which is the best form of inspiration: that I too could do this.
If the reader of a poem knows the poet identifies with a specific gender, do they tend to think of the speaker in the poem as sharing the author’s gender? If so, are they aware they are making that assumption? How many readers make no assumption, or feel no need to ever know the speaker’s gender? How much does the understanding of the speaker’s gender inform the reading of the poem?
There is so much expectation of ‘craft’ in poetry now. It sometimes seems it is the craft that certain editors look at first in a poem, and craft the first thing a poet praises about another poet’s poem.
I myself prefer the craft that makes itself invisible.
If we look at the history of modern art, and the accusations the establishment made against some of the greatest artists of all time—from Monet to Van Gogh, from Cezanne to Picasso, from Pollack to Warhol—the rhetoric was always the same: that’s not art. I could do that. They can’t draw.
Because of their expectations of craft, people missed the art entirely.
There is outsider art. Traditional art. People with aesthetics that were not formed in American MFA programs.
It is unfortunate how rampant educationism is in the art world.
Perhaps poetry in America is attempting to distinguish itself so much that it accepts only those poets it considers distinguished.
It is ironic that Amazon is putting out a new Lord of the Rings, considering the premise of the Rings is various peoples forming a union to combat an evil power attempting to gain dominion over the world.
What if, by enacting the myths of decadence and rebirth in my writing, I am enabling the myths of nationalism?
I grew up in an anti-intellectual climate. I realized as a late teen that it was my ability to think that saved me from self-destructiveness. That is what I am often pursuing in my work—not just in my poetry, but in in everything from my journals to my aphorisms and stories—an analysis of the way things were and are and may be, from the details of my family life, my self, to society in general. Because only by thinking through these things can we save ourselves, save each other, and save what we can of our environment.
Poets who talk shit about poets who write about flowers must be thinking of the bouquets of flowers flown in from across the world that are sold in grocery stores. Or the gardens of the rich. Or the roses of the traditional sonnet.
When I think of flowers I am thinking of the hundreds of thousands of wildflowers I have seen while hiking in the mountains. Of the resilience of cactus flowers in the desert. Of the flowering plants which form the majority of our food. Not just the tomatoes and squashes, but the corn and wheat and rice. The food that feeds the animals we eat.
I’ve spent much time on farms and in orchards. I’ve talked with many farmers. Farming is rarely the domain of the leisure class. Yet their fields are full of flowers. That is how the plants they grow perpetuate themselves. Those plants are how we perpetuate ourselves. To write about flowers, to me, means writing about life, food, economy, persistence, and adaptability. And yes: beauty. Which is what all those things add up to.
Have you ever grown your own food? How many farmers do you know? Have you ever cooked for a living? Some poets assume if you write about flowers, it is because you come from a place of privilege. If all you think about when you think of flowers is roses, perhaps it is you that is privileged.
In the first ninety years of the Nobel prize, a total of six women received the prize in literature.