Issue #18 - Wasps, Words, Weeds, and Feasts for Free
Red, White, and Bee - Felt Pen and Digital Color
I hear a lot, sometimes from my own mouth, that poetry is the highest form of writing. But it isn’t always.
From an interview with Matthew Weiner (Mad Men), David Milch (Deadwood), and Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad)
Matthew Weiner: …There’s still a hierarchy. Forgetting about remuneration and public adulation, there’s still a hierarchy in terms of the writer’s Olympic Dream. I have to warn you, journalism won’t be on this list.
GQ: Thank you for that.
Matthew Weiner: It would start with poetry, then go theater, novel, then film, and then TV, then maybe radio.
GQ: Why is that still true, when it’s obvious that some of the best work is being done on TV?
Vince Gilligan: It takes time. It started out when movies were the movies and TV was this bastard stepchild.
If TV is the stepchild, I wonder on which rung of the filial ladder writing copy for advertisements falls. It’s below journalism, no doubt.
At its basest, the writing of poetry is a skill, a facility with words. This facility can be trained the same as any other skill. That skill then can be applied to writing technical manuals. Or to writing copy for advertising.
Copywriters for advertisements produce some of the most skillful wordwork available today, but you can’t trust it. We –the people being advertised to– know that there is a mechanism working behind the curtains. When our emotions begin to fire, we understand that there is a skilled craftsperson behind it telling our hearts what to feel, and she is using that emotion to ultimately sell us something that we probably have no use for, and for which we had no desire before we heard her words, or saw her words translated into moving images. Masterful copywriting reminds me of the parable in Proverbs 9: Wisdom offers a feast for free to be fed forever while Folly encourages us to steal a crumb and suffer the consequences.
The hope for poetry is that you can trust it. That the person sitting on the other side of the page is actually offering wisdom– a gift – and isn’t trying to take anything from you. Or worse, tell you to take from your neighbor because your survival depends on it. Any entity that tells you so has a suspect, ulterior motive.
What I find in so much poetry is just ad copy. “Propaganda is the only acceptable art these days,” my pastor and resident art historian laments. He feels the same pressure when writing his sermons.
Maybe it’s always been that way. It’s just that the only art that makes it to us through the sieve of human history is that which has enough truth and beauty to survive rapidly changing political fortunes. There’s no end to the making of forgotten art.
A poet has not only to educate himself as a poet, he has also to consider how he is going to earn his living. Ideally, he should have a job which does not in any way involve the manipulation of words…Unfortunately… in earning his living, the average poet has to choose between being a translator, a teacher, a literary journalist or a writer of advertising copy and, of these, all but the first can be directly detrimental to his poetry. - W.H. Auden, The Poet & The City.
When I look at the vast landscape of contemporary poetry, I can easily imagine what Babel must have looked like when God confused the languages. I’m personally flabbergasted by much of what I read, and I have the sneaky suspicion that a lot of other people are as well.
I’ll grant the possibility that I’m not very bright, but as I sound out some of these poems, often I hear a hollow “thunk” like I’m tapping drywall; there’s a veneer of finish, the facade appears similar to those of some other good poems, but there’s no deeper wisdom there. Venturing a hypothesis, I would say that the various tribes of the poetry world are rife with opportunists, like a politician attending a church during an election year.
It’s a reverse shibboleth: as if poets–trained in language–have taught themselves to say the accepted words correctly so they can pass the gatekeepers, but once they’ve gained entry they don’t actually know the deep community wisdom that has allowed the tribe to flourish. They’re in, but they’re useless, maybe even detrimental. In farming, we call that a weed. The parables call it a tare.
Call me a curmudgeon because I’ve found myself outside a tribe. Or probably more accurately, my tribe of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Males have suddenly found ourselves out of fashion and out of power. That certainly drives much of our venomous political theater these days. The analogy to poetry is an easy leap. It’s a war out there.
The common refrain I hear from both sides–in politics and poetry– is that we should not see members of the otherside as neighbors. In war, the stakes of survival are too high to parse friends from enemies. Gerrymander the groups with big, clumsy lines for our security. As Alan Jacobs observed:
The problem is not that many Americans have lost faith in the power to persuade; the problem is that they have lost the desire to persuade. An argument that would win over those people is not an argument worth making. Sweet it is to have enemies…
Persuasion is lost to coercion. Force a behavior; exercise power before it’s taken (or now that we have it), whether it’s with weapons, policy, or cultural influence. Murder is in the air.
Culture Care
Lest ye despair, I turn to the artist Makoto Fujimura, whose book Culture Care encourages artists to stay out of the culture war, and instead make art that is “generative.” He claims the generative approach will “identify and model the ‘grammar’ or conditions that best contribute to a good life and thriving culture.”
He continues:
Discovering and naming this grammar, identifying and then living generative principles, is a process that depends deeply on generosity. This is because it requires us to open ouselves to deep questions (and to their answers), which is impossible when survival seems to depend on competing for scarce resources. But when we acknowledge the gratuitous nature of life–not least the world’s inordinately diverse beauty–gratitude galvanizes us to ask and welcome questions that reach beyond our own context and experience. Artists at their best help us with such questions by presenting an expansive vision of life that reveals beauty in ever-wider zones.
Such a vision is by its nature a challenge to dictators and totalitarian regimes– a threat to those whose power depends on holding humanity at the level of survival…
Art– wise art – should be a generous feast, a gratuitous gift. Foolish art convinces us that the scraps of the world are meager, and we should steal what is ours.
All that said, I wrote the ad copy for a video that will likely be used for some political tinkering in the near future. My hypocrisy knows no bounds.
I Am Amarillo
I’m Seth Wieck. Thanks for the company.
If you liked, or disliked, something here, let me know by replying to the email. I’m happy to continue the conversation.
What I was thinking a decade ago…