-----Original Message-----
From: Susan Pritchard <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
<[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tuesday, July 19, 2005 9:57 AM
Subject: Re: [WDL] The problem of making 'art'

>But with out that act of courage, without taking the risk of showing your
wares in the marketplace..without braving, right or wrong..the judgement of
others, some divine fire dies and you become a dreamer instead of an artist.

There are other models for interaction between the artist and her public
than the marketplace, though I agree that the marketplace predominates; but
surely we should not assume it must be a marketplace and that artistic
production is the production of wares

>Art begins with dreams, visions

not all art, no
a lot starts with a set of procedures

>some divinely inspiried where the artist becomes the tool of Something
beyond him or her.

Can't we keep the divine out of this?

I have considerable sympathy with Alan Sondheim's posting, but I'd like to
pursue this idea of how many people it takes for one of them to be a poet -
I'll assume we are agreed about those required to control the zebra

Reading takes place *after the poem is made; and it is there that the
implicit metaphor of sexual intercourse breaks down, if it is to be
performed by human beings

One has to act alone initially, if we are speaking of the trad model of the
artist working solo. That is of course a limited view. The artist with a
studio of helpers is, in Marx's phrase individuated [as an artist] in the
midst of society. Nor does this necessarily apply only to the past. David
Nash, for instance, works in collaboration with others, locating and moving
the wood he works and in siting it, both being parts of the process.
Benjamin Britten writing at the piano while Imogen Holst took the pages and
orchestrated them. Britten saying No, no, not like that to Peter P

But as well as the collaborative writing I am engaged upon, there is to my
right a little pile of notebooks from which I must transcribe, writing which
no one has seen

I think the idea that a poet is only a poet when she has a reader, or a
painter when she has a viewer is overstated. It is to do with social
acceptance and canon-making; but it is not directly  to do with the process
of making all art. Some art is made in solitude.

If the intention is never to show it then perhaps it needs a different
category - we could leave it near the tree that no one hears fall

That doesn't though tell us anything about how the poetry / painting / music
gets made

I'm not sure how useful it is to pursue this for our purposes

It's similar to that oddity by which a man is not a murderer until he is
found guilty. Then he is a murderer. Then if his conviction is found to be
unsafe he isnt a murderer again; and if he is retried then he may become a
murderer again

But that is all for the purposes of the law. He is regarded as a murderer.

The hypothetical artist who tells no one of their work is not regarded as an
artist. That's something else and sociological and / or careerist in some
cases

Were Hopkins and Traherne not poets for some time? I think that is untrue

L

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