Some Principles Guiding Principles of Selection

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.