Why not indeed, dear W@1 friends and fellow artists!
I was home from college one weekend and riding in the car somewhere with my dad when we drove into a thunderstorm along the interstate highway. The rain came down in the proverbial buckets, flooding the pavement before us. My father, famously a road hog and aggressive driver, ploughed through the drenching at full four-lane speed and then some (back then, all interstate speed limits were 70 mph and most car engines were V-8s, meaning that people like my dad drove 90). The guy ahead of us was obviously in my dad's driving club, for he too barreled on at a homicidal clip, throwing up a rainbow fantail of runoff from both rear wheels of his car.
"That's beautiful!" my dad exclaimed, and then, "Why don't you write a poem about that?" I was an English major and a budding writer of poetry. I think I had just completed my first creative writing course at school. No doubt I'd come home full of pronouncements about the craft. God bless me, I probably had read one of my early efforts to mom and dad at the dinner table!
My dad never attended college, though he must have graduated high school with decent grades. He was a smart man. But he never thought much of the arts, or intellectual pursuits, or even reading for that matter. Seated next to him zooming blindly along that flooded highway was a son who did think much of them, however crudely I did at the time, and who steadfastly refused to major in business or engineering--the kinds of know-how my old man wanted his sons to acquire. (His daughter, you won't be surprised to know, labored under other expectations.)
"Why don't you write about that?" So his was a serious question. Ignoring it wasn't going to work. I had kept my mouth shut, partly because my jaws were too clenched to speak. Partly because I didn't take the question seriously--what did he know about poetry, or beauty?--and so I wasn't about to humor it. But when he asked a second time, I had nothing to say, I realized, because I didn't have a good answer. Why not indeed?
It was an early crisis in aesthetic philosophy--there must be a good reason poets don't write about the sublime of high speed fantails. I'm sure that I mumbled some reply and I'm sure it was lame. As I recall, we both fell back into our natural reticences as the car rocketed on down the road.
The answer to my dad's question has to be one of aesthetics and artistic autonomy. Poetry is an art form. It makes beauty, it doesn't copy it. (Mimetic theory notwithstanding.) Isn't it more appropriate for a poem to start with the mundane, the ordinary, the imprecise, even the dull--as sculpture begins with a block of stone or lump of clay--than to go chasing after the already ordered, the beautiful?
Shouldn't a poem seek beauty where it isn't so obvious instead of where it's blatant? Poems discover beauty by means of work; that is, by coming together word upon word, line upon line, edit upon edit, insight by insight. Surely they don't, and shouldn't, begin with something the world proclaims already to be beautiful and then just copy it down. That's not what the ancients meant by mimesis.
Then again, who knows where a poem gets it legs? Why not write something about those fantails? Maybe my dad was on to something!
Too late now. My dad's long gone. But if we were in that car again and blowing dangerously along some flooded interstate, that's how I'd answer him.
----
Which brings me to our project for the week. I'm going to hand out randomly a card to each of you with a word or phrase written on it. This will be your subject for a poem. Better to think: the card will be your starting point for writing a poem, which may ultimately have little or nothing obvious, more or less to do with the word or phrase written there. Some writing groups call this a "prompt." I'll call it a fantail.
Here's the catch: keep the topic to yourself. Do NOT share it with anybody at Wednesdays@One. Write whatever poem you will, using the topic as your starting point. Next week after you've shared your work with the rest of us, we'll try to identify the topic from your content or treatment.
See you next week.
I was home from college one weekend and riding in the car somewhere with my dad when we drove into a thunderstorm along the interstate highway. The rain came down in the proverbial buckets, flooding the pavement before us. My father, famously a road hog and aggressive driver, ploughed through the drenching at full four-lane speed and then some (back then, all interstate speed limits were 70 mph and most car engines were V-8s, meaning that people like my dad drove 90). The guy ahead of us was obviously in my dad's driving club, for he too barreled on at a homicidal clip, throwing up a rainbow fantail of runoff from both rear wheels of his car.
"That's beautiful!" my dad exclaimed, and then, "Why don't you write a poem about that?" I was an English major and a budding writer of poetry. I think I had just completed my first creative writing course at school. No doubt I'd come home full of pronouncements about the craft. God bless me, I probably had read one of my early efforts to mom and dad at the dinner table!
My dad never attended college, though he must have graduated high school with decent grades. He was a smart man. But he never thought much of the arts, or intellectual pursuits, or even reading for that matter. Seated next to him zooming blindly along that flooded highway was a son who did think much of them, however crudely I did at the time, and who steadfastly refused to major in business or engineering--the kinds of know-how my old man wanted his sons to acquire. (His daughter, you won't be surprised to know, labored under other expectations.)
"Why don't you write about that?" So his was a serious question. Ignoring it wasn't going to work. I had kept my mouth shut, partly because my jaws were too clenched to speak. Partly because I didn't take the question seriously--what did he know about poetry, or beauty?--and so I wasn't about to humor it. But when he asked a second time, I had nothing to say, I realized, because I didn't have a good answer. Why not indeed?
It was an early crisis in aesthetic philosophy--there must be a good reason poets don't write about the sublime of high speed fantails. I'm sure that I mumbled some reply and I'm sure it was lame. As I recall, we both fell back into our natural reticences as the car rocketed on down the road.
The answer to my dad's question has to be one of aesthetics and artistic autonomy. Poetry is an art form. It makes beauty, it doesn't copy it. (Mimetic theory notwithstanding.) Isn't it more appropriate for a poem to start with the mundane, the ordinary, the imprecise, even the dull--as sculpture begins with a block of stone or lump of clay--than to go chasing after the already ordered, the beautiful?
Shouldn't a poem seek beauty where it isn't so obvious instead of where it's blatant? Poems discover beauty by means of work; that is, by coming together word upon word, line upon line, edit upon edit, insight by insight. Surely they don't, and shouldn't, begin with something the world proclaims already to be beautiful and then just copy it down. That's not what the ancients meant by mimesis.
Then again, who knows where a poem gets it legs? Why not write something about those fantails? Maybe my dad was on to something!
Too late now. My dad's long gone. But if we were in that car again and blowing dangerously along some flooded interstate, that's how I'd answer him.
----
Which brings me to our project for the week. I'm going to hand out randomly a card to each of you with a word or phrase written on it. This will be your subject for a poem. Better to think: the card will be your starting point for writing a poem, which may ultimately have little or nothing obvious, more or less to do with the word or phrase written there. Some writing groups call this a "prompt." I'll call it a fantail.
Here's the catch: keep the topic to yourself. Do NOT share it with anybody at Wednesdays@One. Write whatever poem you will, using the topic as your starting point. Next week after you've shared your work with the rest of us, we'll try to identify the topic from your content or treatment.
See you next week.
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