>To me this is to do with being interested in poetry as such, and not in
>delivering important messages to the world or thinking you are transforming
>universal consciousness by disabling language, or, I'm afraid, speaking out
>against what you think is wrong in the public world. By "as such" I mean a
>personal lyrical/ meditational medium which accepts the innate modesty of
>the fact of the individual, more subject to than modulating terrestrial
>forces, essentially a testimony rather than a critique. I find that
>thinking it that way, the scope bcomes potentially greater and the whole
>enterprise more hopeful.
Hear hear.
>newness gets bound up with "importance" in the
>close confines of the "Artistic" -- meaning you increasingly produce what
>is only artistically important, (obsession-led) and of less and less use
>to the world.
Things that are merely novel always end up looking metetricious a few
years on. But sometimes it's hard to sort out which is which.
I really doubt whether any art is useful, much as I would like to think
so. Asking myself crude questions like "does any great work matter more
than the life of a child?" was quite illuminating, because unless you're
Leni Reifenstahl or someone equally blind the answer is pathetically
obvious. To me anyway. Paradoxically it made me more committed to my
own work. Given all that, art is surely obsession-led in any case - why
would you do it otherwise?
Maybe cases of petering off are to do with an ossification of
consciousness. Or some kind of damage to do with the intense struggle of
the earlier work. Or just exhaustion. I don't know. But all gifts are
double edged.
AC
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