It's kind of hard to articulate. It's like I learned too much about what a "good poem" is or means.
I wrote a poem in my creative writing class about suicide. I was praised for opening up the floor for writings about vulnerable topics. I have never attempted suicide or really been suicidal though. In that I have considered heavily how it is possible to go on, but I have never fathomed killing myself. I don't really know why I wrote the poem. It is certainly good to try writing about many different things, some that don't reflect your own life. But what is a good poem? How to tell if a poem is good?
I became very disgusted with my own writing after I dropped out of college the first time. It felt like I had lost track of what made my writing mine. It was like I knew too much about how to write poems and my poems had become intelligible only to people who had taken similar classes as me and could sieve meaning, real or imagined, out of unstructured word-mush that used sharp and disturbing juxtapositions of evocative words but didn't say anything and weren't about anything.
Literary poems were initially so exciting to me. I liked the way strange combinations of words made distressing and flavorful images light up in my brain.
But I read hundreds and hundreds of the Literary poems (published in journals and such) and eventually it was like an illusion was removed. The words no longer seemed carefully chosen. It felt like there was nothing really "behind" the poems at all. It seemed like throwing together words at random would produce the same effects. There was not enough intentionality, and few of the poems had much of a distinctive style or were memorable.
I don't mean to be anti-intellectual or negative about poetry as an art. I've been exploring my very negative feelings about Literary poetry for a while. I just feel like poems should be something a person could appreciate if they came across it without having had those classes. If you showed a person without a specific kind of education a lot of Literary poetry they would be like "None of this makes any sense. I don't know what it's saying. It's like gibberish." You could only find any beauty in it if you very intentionally sat down with it in mind that "This is a POEM and it has MEANING" and were focused on extracting that meaning.
Maybe that's okay. I guess it is okay. I don't want to be like those guys bitching about Modern Art who are scared of anything that is abstract or weird.
Why don't I want to be like them? Because their range of understanding of the things that can be beautiful and meaningful is sadly small, and I believe everything is worth being curious about.
It's different though. Writing hasn't much physicality to it when it is digital, with the words displayed in a pre-determined font. I enjoy many modern art pieces because they are physical objects put together with hands. They embody and capture and encode a physical struggle between the medium and the body of the artist; the frustration I feel when I hold a pencil, striving to make the physical material of graphite and paper form into what my mind imagines.
Typed words don't physically resist in the same way. They don't seethe with the stochastic. All the poetry I have done since my poetry classes has been collage or blackout poetry because being able to just use any words I can imagine is so boring. I want the medium to resist me.
I'm getting way off topic. I hate workshopping. I think it's a terrible way to improve as an artist. No matter how many times you reassure students that they can choose to take feedback or not, the feedback still forms the universe of possible responses to your poem and things that could possibly be wrong or right with it. So you frame your changes within that universe.
This is not really getting at what I hate about workshopping though. I would only want to hear from people who either were absolutely crazy about my poem, or who absolutely hated it. Feedback on art from people who were indifferent about the art is worse than worthless. Why would an artist want to hear about how to improve their art from someone who felt nothing at all about it? I would say it's a waste of time to change the poem so the person who felt nothing likes it a little more. As though "Slight liking" is what people are supposed to feel about poems. I want to hear from the person who felt something, whether that something was positive or negative. What made them feel? Why?
I have some unusual opinions about art though. I think that when art is recognized as having artistic merit by, you know -- High culture. People who are important. People who are qualified to recognize artistic merit -- that is when the art becomes crap. It doesn't retroactively become crap once it is recognized as good, but subsequent art becomes more and more likely to be crap, the more likely it is that the art will be recognized as real art.
When a writer is accepted into one of those poetry journals, they have certainty of being taken seriously as art, treated as sophisticated, literary, and culturally valuable. And I think writing in the condition of striving toward that, kills the art. Or maybe recognizing an art form as having artistic merit kills that art form. I don't know. It's hard to articulate.
Maybe it's connected to my beliefs on intrinsic motivation. I think the best motivation for doing something is for no reason at all. Just because you can. Just because you want to. As human beings we all need that. Something we do because we just want to do it. And outside incentives being added, I think, might pollute that motivation.
We have all heard and felt that certain things are "cringe." But what IS cringe? I think that good art should feel a tiny bit embarrassing and make you want to cringe to some extent.
The gratifying, secure, comfortable hum of enjoying a piece of art that everyone agrees is good and intellectual and sophisticated, I don't think that's good. When you feel a twinge of anxiety or flinch of mortification, a threat to your ego and security as an appreciator of the Correct Art, that is much more indicative of good art.
That is just my opinion. I'm still forming my thoughts on these things.
