So, the other day party of my heart & jesmimi & I did a little panel for MLK day on creative writing and social justice. Party organized it, it was great, a completely surprising number of people came, we all looked hot doing it, fine. Since then, I've been thinking about some of the issues we talked about: politics & aesthetics, who gets to speak for/to whom, teaching writing as a mode of social justice, beauty and morality, guilt, truth. Heavy stuff. What happened to me a little bit at the panel discussion is something that used to happen to me in grad school classes. I've thought about the issues, done some reading, I think I know what I want to say, and half way through saying it I feel 1) like I don't really even know what I'm talking about, and/or 2) like I am completely wrong and want to immediately reverse all my previous statements & argue the exact opposite. These are just the flashes I'm getting as words are physically coming out of my mouth. Sure, I get the occasional flash of "wow, hit that nail on the head, I didn't even know I had that in me," but those are few & far between.
I felt okay, even good, about the panel afterward though, but now my appetite is whetted. I want to think more about these things, so I figured I'd throw it out there. What do you all think about morality in your writing, or the responsibility of your art to contribute to The Greater Good? Have you read anything lately that seems relevant to these issues? We'll have our own little panel discussion here, and no aggressive nail-clipping, dog-rescuing Christian speakers will be able to muck up the Q&A.
(title=party thought we might start the panel with a rousing chorus of kumbayah, but we saved that for later, when the Christian speaker heard us gossiping about her & came back to kick our asses.)
4 comments:
I think about these issues all the time. When I first started writing, about six years ago, I read an Alice Fulton piece in the Nation that really inspired me, really made me think. It was called “A Poetry of Inconvenient Knowledge.” (How do you all feel about Alice Fulton? I can’t claim to be well read in poetry, contemporary or otherwise, but that Alice Fulton, man, I think she kicks ass.) Anyway, this article really inspired me to write about SOMETHING, about issues, to explore and tackle things that are difficult. I'm not saying I've succeeded in this yet. Sigh. (She was not saying that contemporary American poets were not doing these things, but that far too few of them were, and that more than not were concerned with the self more than anything else). It’s basically a call to poets (and writers in general, I suppose, though she references those literary terms such as formalism, which I understand, basically, and “language poets,” which I wouldn’t mind if someone clarified a bit more for me--the term “language poets” I have always found amusing and bemusing--as opposed to the poets who use legos?) to consider their content, to talk about content, to go beyond the comfortable discussion, beyond talking about and adhering to form, maybe? (I’m not too up on poetry criticism, and maybe this has changed in the past six years.) She quotes Taduesz Borowski: “'There can be no beauty if it is paid for by human injustice, nor truth that passes over injustices in silence, nor moral virtue that condones it.’" And then she goes on to say "If we refuse to consider the implications of our words, our poems will reflect rather than revise aesthetic and cultural norms. If, on the other hand, we focus on content, we might notice⎯and counter––the complacency and complicity within poetry of every shape.”
In this Fulton essay, she says something about poets of color writing about race, but “colorless” poets not touching the topic, and it made me think of the question of who can speak for whom that Starrykick brings up. I’m taking the idea of Morality to be the social justice kind, the kind our current admin. seems to ignore to instead focus on sexual morality and who have all but co-opted the term to mean as much. (or, a Good versus Evil thing: Wait, Jesmimi, are these twins good or bad boys? I’m not sure...––of course, this literature is shelved in a different section, the one with the raised, metallic fonts and the pictures of angel wings and devils with pig’s hooves and quotes from Revelation instead of blurbs.)
Anyway, I, too, often find myself contradicting myself over and over until I don’t know what I think anymore. I can sense a sprawling, shapeless post coming if I keep going, that is, even more so than it already is, so I’ll stop here for now.
p.s. Just got an email that Alice Fulton will be in the Hopwood room tomorrow. She must be doing a reading? Weird.
On the subjects of writing and social justice and writing and morality, I would first like to posit that they're a little different, no? As in w&sj is more of a worldly thing, whereas w&m is, or can be, more transcendent, more "eternal," more relatable to those terms that begin with "meta-." This is not to say that w&sj cannot be transcendent, but, that it less often is, or that it is less often taken to be.
For instance, if I were to write a novel about gay marriage in the 00's, about love and commitment and moralising and narrow-mindedness, it would not, I don't think, have the same staying power of a Great Gatsby, whose plot--contriving a new self for a love, living in a country where this has always been, and presumably always will be, encouraged--can perhaps be applied as culturally and temporally resonant for future generations.
Or maybe what I mean is this: societies change, rise, fall, mutate, taking with them their specific mores and manifestations of 'justice.' But many things about human existence--that we die, that we suffer, that we must live on in the face of these two truths, even after we know them to be true--never change, and will never, thereby making writing that is not too much besot with social justice issues--the gay marriage novel wherein the gm is merely an entree into the drama, and not the continual backdrop--longer-lasting, more worthwhile.
Whew--still there with me folks? Alright then, so let me say what is by now pretty obvious: yes I think that we need to write with higher goods in mind, because why are we doing it anyway? For [insert stifled laughter here] profit? For fame? So we can shag Liv Tyler in a New Zealand bar because she's drunk and saw our jacket photo? Ha ha ha ha, people, of course none of those things. Of course none of those things at all.
Of course, that being said, I do think it's easier to speak directly to problems as a poet than it is as a writer, and this is so because poets have more direct access to their voices when they write. True, right? Because certainly from a reader's perspective--okay, uneducated reader's perspective--when people read poetry they are much more likely to think that the poet is speaking to them than when they read fiction. And, at least from my perspective, I know that when I write I spend most of my time trying to track down the narrator's voice, and once I find it I don't ever really insert my own into it. Obviously at some level the subject matter is chosen by me, ibid the thematic content and moral scope, but by the time it all gets to the page I have effectively abdicated, and am now prostrating in front of the more important god (at that moment), the one of good, natural writing.
Still though, I highly agree with that thing that Klam said last year, which I think I've written about before, actually, on these very pages: the job of a writer is to observe, think, judge/construe, and report back to all the poor schlubs in the world who were not born the way we were, who mostly just sit down and watch.
First, to knee hi: fuck yeah of course white people can write black or hispanic or asian narrators, and men women narrators, and on and on. And screw all those fascist liberals who say they can't, because guess where that very slippery, very steep slope ends up--all of us tumbled down and sitting neatly in our own, personalized, perfectly-us compartments. Every one of my narrators is white and male and half-Jewish, half-Catholic, from New England, short, and incredibly sexy. How boring! How stultifying!
We make shit up, that's what we do. It's on us to do it well, and it's not on any one else to tell us we can't try. That shit's called censorship.
Second--real quick--I wanted to say/add/ammend that it's not on us to moralise or socially justicise as much as it is to...to ask questions. Or no, this: to cause the reader to ask questions, to question things. To take a new look, to see a new way, and to confront any and all presuppositions and biases and hatreds and even loves, because we must examine, we must always take back down from our shelves and again examine. Because the moment we stop looking at things from new angles and in new light we lose our capacity for compassion. And when we lose our compassion, when we lose our compassion....
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