I will continue to flesh out and clarify and/or qualify and elaborate my various arguments throughout these posts. Those who are hung up excessively on consistency of viewpoint have likely not been charmed and haunted by Whitman's famous quote: "Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself."
I mention that quote because I'd like to qualify some things from my last post, but also because I feel that I'm performing a public service by disseminating the quote even more, though I've heard it pop up more and more in recent years.
Thinking of Ezra Pound's pronouncement that "nations will be judged by their anthologies," the crucial matter behind that phrase is the notion that principles of selection and judgment are the sole means by which the accomplishments of the "guardians of art" will be judged.
But the principles of selection for a magazine, even one of the highest caliber, are not the same principles of selection that we should use when selecting works for anthologies, or even for selecting books to publish, based on their literary merits. Magazines play a vital role in showcasing the influential trends in art and other endeavors. There is generally a rather higher level of quality in the quality national literary journals than is acknowledged by the most curmudgeonly among us; but magazines in general, even the quality quarterlies, should not be held to an impossibly exacting standard in their selections of works that they choose to showcase. The literary magazine in the past century has been a vibrant, dynamic battlefield of ideas, experimentation, and tentative judgments. So the best magazines sometimes publish the less-than-excellent work by famous names, when others have a hard time finding their way into print. So what? It's not for the magazines to decide which of these poems should be gathered into anthologies, textbooks, "Best American So-and-So" and so on; this is the duty of our cultural guardians, and this is where the impossibly exacting standards of judgment and selection should come into play.
The problem of the pandemic distribution of really bad anthologies is far more problematic than the fact that winning a Pulitzer guarantees wide publication in magazines. This is apparently a problem of blurred roles. So I won't be so unreasonable as to insist that the creation of bad art is automatically bad for art. I think, however, that most of the time when bad art is held up as being excellent art, such posturing is no help to the state of the arts in any form.
It should be obvious to all literary tastemakers, and common knowledge among anyone who would make literary judgments that one should judge any artist based on the best of that artist's work. There are some literatteurs who are more consistently skilled than others, but there is only one commonality among all artists, even the greatest: all artists have created bad art. Some create nothing but bad art, but to write five truly important poems in 50 years of devoting a lifetime to writing poems is a major accomplishment. With any luck, and with years of application, one might conceivably create a body of work which is largely excellent, but even among the masters we should not confuse greatness or confidence with perfection or infallibility. So hero worship will ultimately disappoint. I admire many poems by James Wright, for instance, and so would call him a great poet. But I won't pretend that all of his poems are great.
It's true that sometimes great art strikes out of seemingly nowhere. But then, we rational humans are quick to take credit for the work of our subconscious mind, which is always doing some of our homework for us. It's true that sometimes the best work seems to write itself, and that the act of creation becomes more an act of surrender than the imposition of one's rational will. The masters understand the benefits of revelation, but also the pitfalls. One should not confuse poetic or artistic powers, epiphanies, flashes of clarity, etc. with creative omnipotence. Too often discussions on these matters is dichotomized, stripped of its gradations. One introduction to poetry textbook, for instance, downplaying the contribution of drugs and drink to the process of literary creation says something along the lines of "It's a steep, rocky drive up Parnassus, "--which is to say something like "friends don't let friends drink and drive up the gods of poetic inspiration." I think it's more important to make the point that one shouldn't REVISE under the influence of inspiration, drugs, mental breakdown, that sort of thing. But one should certainly follow the urge to write if and when it strikes. Sometimes miraculous acts of art appear at bizarre or inopportune moments. But it's important for new artists to understand that all acts of art which one creates from some seeming extra-rational source is not automatically excellent, and depending on the skills and/or instincts of the creator of the work, is often just inspired bad art. But it's also important for the advocates of fine craftsmanship to acknowledge the experience of ecstatic revelation in the act of creating art for many a fine artist. To deny that spirit of revelation called by various names is to dismiss a force that many artists recognize as being very real, and will likely erode the ethos of whoever propagates such a denial.
Speaking of denial; that is the primary danger of relying solely on the intuitive and inspired utterance in creation and revision. Certainly revision has been known to disrupt the vision; so perhaps the revision has no place in the vision. In which case revision might begin post-inspiration. The creation of art is often a passionate act. Revision should be a more sober one, but need not interfere with the vision, and one can save revising for less-inspired moments.
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Laying it out for the laypeople; poetic popularity and the page-versus-performance debate
One reason I wanted to add an editor's blog was to create something of a lively, less formal companion to our website. Among other things, this will (hopefully) also help Rager Media to connect with those who might not be deeply familiar with the literary publishing industry, but are interested in knowing more about it. For this reason, I hope that those among the initiated who read these entries will be patient when I discuss topics that might seem obvious to them; what's obvious to the specialist may be a revelation to the average reader. There are any number of Frequently Asked Questions which I will address along the way. I also hope to stir some passions; my tastes in literature are exacting but specific. I'm bound to provoke some rage. If so, EXCELLENT--please feel free to leave ranting comments on this blog for the amusement and/or edification of others.
Sometime around 2004, at an Oberlin College booksigning, U.S. Poet Laureate and "literary rock star" Billy Collins talked about the need to open what he called "the closed circuit." In other words, the future of the print poetry institutions (and by logical extension, "literary fiction," though I don't believe that he factored fiction into his literary equation) depends upon poets reaching beyond the relatively closed circles of those who are already plugged into the literary establishment to find an audience beyond the English Departments of America.
Obviously poetry has seen a resurgence in recent years. There is no shortage of popular literary events--poetry slams, etc.. The fact that there's a show on HBO called Def Poetry Jam testifies to the potential for poetry's mainstream appeal. Unfortunately, there is a LOT of bad poetry (particularly on HBO's Def Poetry Jam) being shouted out on stages everywhere; but then, there are quite a few notable examples of very talented "performance poets." "Page poets" tend to be just a tad smug about their poetic roles, often feeling superior to "performance poets," whom they perceive to be all histrionics and subject matter and no real poetic talent. This is a remarkably unsubtle attitude, especially considering how many really bad poems find their way into print in some of the best national literary magazines.
That said, the really bad performance poets do tend to give poets a bad name. But then, so do the really bad print poets. I think of Ezra Pound's contention (something along the following lines) that the main advantage of the public's neglect of poetry is that censors and legislators also pay little attention to it. Similarly, the damage done to the public perception of poetry by bad print poems is minimized by the fact that most people don't read them. So because performance poetry tends to be more publicly conspicuous, the effusion of really bad performance poetry promises to accomplish an estrangement of poetry and the public on a scale that bad page poetry could never aspire to.
I've never undertaken a longitudinal empirical comparison of ratios of horrible poems to good poems between poetry for the page and poetry for the stage, but if I were a gambling man, which I'm not, I'd wager that there are more excellent poems recorded in our nation's best literary journals than have ever been composed exclusively for performance in the last couple of decades. But I'd also like to make a distinction between rap and performance poetry, which are largely different forms. Much of the best oral poetry to be found today is in rap music. Anyone who witnessed Mos Def's or Snoop Dogg's freestyling on MTV's now-defunct Lyricist Lounge Show would be hard-pressed to deny the potential for literary genius (yes, genius) in the hip-hop movement. It's obvious that critics will one day cease to fawn over the mostly forgettable work of Langston Hughes, for instance, in favor of the verbal masterpieces of Mos Def at his best. Langston Hughes will always remain important historically, but those with discerning tastes for truly accomplished poetry will one day summon the courage to sweep out the dusty specimens in the literary canon in favor of real working models from which contemporary poets can learn. Gone from the introductory anthologies, hopefully, will be Wordsworth, whose work should be studied as history (of course English majors should read Wordsworth--for the same reason that they should probably read the later work of T.S. Eliot: it's largely drivel, but has been inordinately influential), some of which will be seen as decent-enough for its time, but none of which poets writing today could learn anything of value from. With any luck, Shakespeare's sonnets will go, and the real poetic accomplishments of Shakespeare, which are to be found in his plays, will still be relevant.
It always surprises me when intelligent people dismiss an entire artistic mode. Performance poetry is often dismissed by the literati for the same reason that many people reject poetry produced by the literary establishment. The fact is that bad art is bad for art, if only because the preservation of the arts is a difficult thing, and if the serious arts weren't so endangered, the glut of bad artistic examples wouldn't be so dangerous and frustrating. Institutions which already thrive need no defenders or apologists; most people won't dismiss Jazz just because of the pseudo-jazz hack Kenny G. People don't generally give up on film as an artform just because they spent ten dollars on Rocky VI. Just because most of the poetry you'll hear on the stage is terrible does not mean that it's somehow an inherently flawed mode of poetic expression. After all, if I weren't a poet myself, and I didn't know that one will find excellent poems in the literary journals if you look hard enough, I might pick up a respected literary journal and conclude from that magazine that print poetry is crap, that contemporary poets have no ear, and that prosody died and went to Pandemonium. Or perhaps it took the slow boat down the River of Forgetfulness and Oblivion.
Sometime around 2004, at an Oberlin College booksigning, U.S. Poet Laureate and "literary rock star" Billy Collins talked about the need to open what he called "the closed circuit." In other words, the future of the print poetry institutions (and by logical extension, "literary fiction," though I don't believe that he factored fiction into his literary equation) depends upon poets reaching beyond the relatively closed circles of those who are already plugged into the literary establishment to find an audience beyond the English Departments of America.
Obviously poetry has seen a resurgence in recent years. There is no shortage of popular literary events--poetry slams, etc.. The fact that there's a show on HBO called Def Poetry Jam testifies to the potential for poetry's mainstream appeal. Unfortunately, there is a LOT of bad poetry (particularly on HBO's Def Poetry Jam) being shouted out on stages everywhere; but then, there are quite a few notable examples of very talented "performance poets." "Page poets" tend to be just a tad smug about their poetic roles, often feeling superior to "performance poets," whom they perceive to be all histrionics and subject matter and no real poetic talent. This is a remarkably unsubtle attitude, especially considering how many really bad poems find their way into print in some of the best national literary magazines.
That said, the really bad performance poets do tend to give poets a bad name. But then, so do the really bad print poets. I think of Ezra Pound's contention (something along the following lines) that the main advantage of the public's neglect of poetry is that censors and legislators also pay little attention to it. Similarly, the damage done to the public perception of poetry by bad print poems is minimized by the fact that most people don't read them. So because performance poetry tends to be more publicly conspicuous, the effusion of really bad performance poetry promises to accomplish an estrangement of poetry and the public on a scale that bad page poetry could never aspire to.
I've never undertaken a longitudinal empirical comparison of ratios of horrible poems to good poems between poetry for the page and poetry for the stage, but if I were a gambling man, which I'm not, I'd wager that there are more excellent poems recorded in our nation's best literary journals than have ever been composed exclusively for performance in the last couple of decades. But I'd also like to make a distinction between rap and performance poetry, which are largely different forms. Much of the best oral poetry to be found today is in rap music. Anyone who witnessed Mos Def's or Snoop Dogg's freestyling on MTV's now-defunct Lyricist Lounge Show would be hard-pressed to deny the potential for literary genius (yes, genius) in the hip-hop movement. It's obvious that critics will one day cease to fawn over the mostly forgettable work of Langston Hughes, for instance, in favor of the verbal masterpieces of Mos Def at his best. Langston Hughes will always remain important historically, but those with discerning tastes for truly accomplished poetry will one day summon the courage to sweep out the dusty specimens in the literary canon in favor of real working models from which contemporary poets can learn. Gone from the introductory anthologies, hopefully, will be Wordsworth, whose work should be studied as history (of course English majors should read Wordsworth--for the same reason that they should probably read the later work of T.S. Eliot: it's largely drivel, but has been inordinately influential), some of which will be seen as decent-enough for its time, but none of which poets writing today could learn anything of value from. With any luck, Shakespeare's sonnets will go, and the real poetic accomplishments of Shakespeare, which are to be found in his plays, will still be relevant.
It always surprises me when intelligent people dismiss an entire artistic mode. Performance poetry is often dismissed by the literati for the same reason that many people reject poetry produced by the literary establishment. The fact is that bad art is bad for art, if only because the preservation of the arts is a difficult thing, and if the serious arts weren't so endangered, the glut of bad artistic examples wouldn't be so dangerous and frustrating. Institutions which already thrive need no defenders or apologists; most people won't dismiss Jazz just because of the pseudo-jazz hack Kenny G. People don't generally give up on film as an artform just because they spent ten dollars on Rocky VI. Just because most of the poetry you'll hear on the stage is terrible does not mean that it's somehow an inherently flawed mode of poetic expression. After all, if I weren't a poet myself, and I didn't know that one will find excellent poems in the literary journals if you look hard enough, I might pick up a respected literary journal and conclude from that magazine that print poetry is crap, that contemporary poets have no ear, and that prosody died and went to Pandemonium. Or perhaps it took the slow boat down the River of Forgetfulness and Oblivion.
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Why the Name Rager Media? Some naming FAQ's
I'm frequently asked why we have the name that we have. For one, the CEO and publisher of Rager Media's name is Eric Rager. Not to be confused with Eric Racher, a Rager Media author.
How is 'Rager' pronounced?
Rager is pronounced with a hard 'g,' though everyone will likely continue to pronounce it with a soft 'g,' because it's the pronounciation that makes better phonetic sense in English and some other languages.
But Rager Media doesn't sound like an independent literary venture. It sounds dreadfully corporate. In fact, it doesn't sound in the least bit literary. Shouldn't it be called Something-or-other Press or something. Please explain yourself.
Yes, well there are a number of reasons why we're named this way. For one, the name Rager Media is very searchable. If we called ourselves High Art Press, American Literary Press, or something like that, it wouldn't be as easy to find in a search engine. Also, we want it to sound corporate, to signify that we're an entrepreneurial literary venture. We're not a big corporation, but we're in business to make money for our authors and us. So though I believe that we're providing a valuable public service, we intend to continue to do so without being beholden to any institutions. We believe that demonstrating the marketability of literary work will ultimately benefit the entire literary industry. Also, we chose "Media" instead of "Press" to keep our options open, and because it's a little different than what most other publishing companies are doing.
How is 'Rager' pronounced?
Rager is pronounced with a hard 'g,' though everyone will likely continue to pronounce it with a soft 'g,' because it's the pronounciation that makes better phonetic sense in English and some other languages.
But Rager Media doesn't sound like an independent literary venture. It sounds dreadfully corporate. In fact, it doesn't sound in the least bit literary. Shouldn't it be called Something-or-other Press or something. Please explain yourself.
Yes, well there are a number of reasons why we're named this way. For one, the name Rager Media is very searchable. If we called ourselves High Art Press, American Literary Press, or something like that, it wouldn't be as easy to find in a search engine. Also, we want it to sound corporate, to signify that we're an entrepreneurial literary venture. We're not a big corporation, but we're in business to make money for our authors and us. So though I believe that we're providing a valuable public service, we intend to continue to do so without being beholden to any institutions. We believe that demonstrating the marketability of literary work will ultimately benefit the entire literary industry. Also, we chose "Media" instead of "Press" to keep our options open, and because it's a little different than what most other publishing companies are doing.
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