Showing Your Work

December 22, 2004

In what promises to be an interesting series of posts, Brian Campbell riffs on Josh Corey’s (and Bürger’s) distinctions between organic and non-organic poetries.

In the post, he highlights the precise paragraph of Josh’s that I find most troubling:

I’m interested in at least trying to experience any text that in some way foregrounds its artifice and involves or implicates me in meaning-production. And I’m much quicker to reject bad or even good organic work than I am nonorganic writing because I feel like its form is a lie that won’t admit it’s lying. (I’m speaking of modern and contemporary writing, of course; I can love Keats without making any claims for his inorganicity.)

This idea that making the artistic effort– the “work” in the labor meaning of the term– more visible is necessarily a good thing just doesn’t go down. I don’t feel it is impossibly illogical to maintain that while it is true that easy epiphanies and soft poems bereft of original thought but expressed poetically exist in vast quantities, this doesn’t mean that only poems which foreground their structures are authentic.

It’s not as if Keats, to use Josh’s examples, gave us anything new in terms of ideas. All the stories are old. The genius is in the details. And there are new details and new stories to be had without necessarily invoking a theoreticians layer of foregrounding the process of writing and being willfully obscure so as to force the reader into gratuitous involvement in “meaning-production.” One job a writer can undertake is sharing and sharing doesn’t necessarily mean involvement in the production of meaning in order to do something new. I’m not going to take a perspective that “if the well is really so dry that you don’t want to write works with meaning, but instead stimulate others to create meanings for you, then why write at all” but I am going to assert that there is plenty new to be done under both rubrics, and proof of that is all around us every day.

I don’t mean that poems have to be easy, only that seeing the ribs beneath the form is just one kind of beauty amongst many. And if many organic writers fall prey to the temptations of repetition in all its many modes (ideas, forms, structure, language), it’s likewise evident that many non-organic writers fall prey to the temptation of avoiding the work that makes writing a poem a communicative act of creation that shares and invites rather than a more or less random association of connotations with no spark of interest at all. That’s a game that interests me very little.

Tags: Poetry and Poetics