A Gentler Poetics: Towards a New Theory of Kindness in the Arts

2006-10-13T02:37:00.000-07:00

The language of competency, while offering a clearly defined avenue toward success for a practitioner of the arts, establishes for him (for in this language-use there can only be hims) a tiny little fascism because of the unequivocal necessity that any element of randomness or accident is, if admitted, controlled or at the very least shackled into a rigid chance-based schema (as in the case of Cage or sometimes Mac Low). What I desire is a more gentle approach to success, to the formation of meaning that admits hesitancy to occupy a central and dominating role over purpose; I want to understand writing, if not other art practices, as a forum for kindness between people with the text as a site within who’s bounds kindness can occur and is encouraged to occur by all involved in the interaction. This might be viewed by many as a weakness, an avoidance of the necessity of order for any sort of accomplishment to arise. I would respond that I am trying to avoid order, more precisely the over-arching need for order, always and forever, I’m trying to avoid accomplishment; I want nothing to arise; I’m suspicious of the language that privileges things arising. It is in this spirit that I recently read Jessica Smith’s Organic Furniture Cellar. In it, the poems operate on the page in no discernible order which is not to say they have no connection to one another, only that the connection is made as fast as the eye moves from word to word, rather than by the linear manner grammar and syntax and sentences force us into. The page becomes a vestige of a deliberate process, an artifact, or a stilled map, words we catch in the act of meaning as though the page threatened their purport not because of any intrinsic instability rather because of our expectations that they mean. Taken as an entirety, the page can seem to slip into chaos with words places in an apparently haphazard fashion, but such a reading belies the position of privilege such a reader’s thoughts have in the world of meaning-formation; their reading is the unthreatened vantage, the unchallenged hill of tradition where any approach by an enemy can be seen and thwarted without any real need for action simply because of the vantage’s stronghold and stature; when we stop crashing against the walls of this keep we cease to exist.

a kinder space for poetics

A Gentler Poetics: Towards a New Theory of Kindness in the Arts