Tribes of Art

Click on image to see full article at The Guardian's Books blog.

"Hang out at any big gathering of artists long enough and, [Scott] McCloud argues, you will see the artists gravitate towards four clusters, or tribes. These tribes represent the fundamental values those artists hold and strive towards in their work. They are not impermeable concrete bunkers, and most artists have their feet in two or more tribes."

* * *

"But every tribe has weaknesses to balance their strengths. For all their ability to move an audience, Animists are often the most colloquial and narrow-minded artists. Classicists might know what is great, but in constantly repeating it can easily become boring. While style-conscious Formalists can be so concerned with experimentation that their creations lack heart and soul. And the Iconoclasts, determined to change the world, risk making art consumed by negativity and anger. Whichever tribe you belong to, it's worth opening your mind to the strengths and values of your opponents, even when enjoying a really good argument with them."

[via Silliman's Blog]

To Examine "It"

"I don't write to express myself. I write to examine 'it.' There is a lot of 'it' out there. This is what my poetry does. That I have standpoints emerging from my social locations (class, religious culture, gender, national origin) is a true statement; that I make intricate weaves of these elements is true; that I can learn more about any social location and respond to it if sufficiently moved is also true. I begin by setting out from myself, as you say -- precisely, because by beginning I get beyond the boundedness of 'self' into something more. As for 'me,' -- forget 'me' or 'I.' It's as if we are yearning toward a new pronoun to understand something else than what subject positions emerge from the pronouns we already know and use."
~ Rachel Blau DuPlessis, in an interview with CAConrad

Rules of Thumb

Mary Biddinger: "My Unwritten Poetry Rules" -- with several others sharing their own self-imposed guidelines in the comments section.

.OOOOOOO.

"Craft and style are essential to honing emotional content into something greater than mere confession or less appealing forms of monomania -- I'm not wholly enthralled with the idea of poetry being a substitute for therapy or group-groping apologetics -- but the continual emphasis on poets and poetry as subject matter represents a flight from the standard practice of poetry as an extraordinary way to fathom that unexplainable condition of being human."
~ Ted Burke, "No More Poems About Poetry"

.OOOOOOO.

Young Poets
by Nicanor Parra

Write as you will
In whatever style you like
Too much blood has run under the bridge
To go on believing
That only one road is right.

In poetry everything is permitted.

With only this condition of course,
You have to improve the blank page.

(trans. by Miller Williams)

Working Class Poem

"To assume that the 'true' working class poem is only a narrative exposition of working class 'experience,' is to buy into normative reading patterns established by post-WWII academic poetries in the U.S. This assumption precludes the full possibilities of language, isolating working class poets to a particular kind of expressionism. It would be difficult to find a parallel prescription placed on the depiction of class in other art forms."
~ Kathy Lou Schultz, "Talking Trash, Talking Class: What's a Working Class Poetic, and Where Would I Find One?" (1998)
[via wood s lot]

Only States of Being

"I despise stories, as they mislead people into believing that something has happened. In fact, nothing really happens as we flee from one condition to another. Because today there are only states of being -- all stories have become obsolete and clichéd, and have resolved themselves. All that remains is time. This is probably the only thing that's still genuine -- time itself: the years, days, hours, minutes and seconds."
~ Béla Tarr
[via Spurious]

__________

About Béla Tarr:
"Hope Deep Within - Béla Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies," by Gabe Klinger
"The Melancholy of Resistance: The Films of Béla Tarr," by Peter Hames

Theory

"There is no such thing as a poem without a theory."
~ Ron Silliman (12 August 2008)

"When a writer says that he or she 'has no' theory or just simply writes whatever they may be 'given' to write, it does not mean that there is no theory, but rather that they refuse to look at these things, and that that is a critical, indeed foundational, part of their own theory, i.e. their own practice as poets."

One-Liners

"Poetry today has as one of its tasks that of clearing public life of images and giving us art instead."
~ Lyn Hejinian, "The Sad Note in a Poetics of Consciousness," in Poetry and Public Language (2007)
[As cited by Catherine Martin in "No Way Out" (Pores, August 2008)]

__________

"Too often, the focus on literal truth presents us not with the essence or core of the poet's being, but with the patio furniture of his or her life."
~ David Alpaugh, "The Professionalization of Poetry" (2003): Part One, Part Two

__________

"There is a weather report in almost every folk poem. The sun is shining; it was snowing; the wind was blowing.... The folk poet knows that it's wise to immediately establish the connection between the personal and the cosmic."
~ Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks (2008)
[Excerpt at Poetry Daily]