on poetry
Dear Aryan and Cecilia
Read your exchange on poetry on the kagablog and found both your comments interesting. i am battling to recall offhand what i said about poetry being either good or bad, or in what context, but yes, i agree that what is “good” or “bad” is subjective.
if i may add to this: a while back, i publicly stated that certain poems from my collection Bog Docks, and April in the Moon-Sun, were “experiments” in cutup writing. then one of our literary wonder boys said something to the effect that if they were “experiments” they were not the “finished product” and therefore should not have been published.
can someone please tell me what is meant by a “finished product”? Is there such a thing as a finished poem, movie, painting, novel, or song? Even Paul Valery, in many respects a somewhat conservative thinker, said: “No work is ever completed, merely abandoned.”
In my opinion, any creative work that is not produced according to a formula is by its essense “an experiment”, any creative work worth its salt is an experiment - if it isnt, then it is just repeating something that has already been done before.
Gary Cummiskey
Dye Hard Press
http://dyehard-press.blogspot.com
December 31st, 2007 at 3:35 am
one neednt reveal
ones “technique”
save for the
desired end product..
“the poem.”.
how one arrives
is of
no importance.
save for blagging..
and poets do
that all too well..
December 31st, 2007 at 2:57 pm
“bravo gary!
most of my creations never take longer than three hours
i admire artist who go back to the artwork for days without end
and then miraculously they get to a point where they say, “it’s finished.”
maybe they just got fucking bored with it
there is also a term we used a lot in Technicon,
when working too long on something.
we used to say “don’t overwork the painting”, meaning, stop when you reach the climax otherwise you loose the essence”
i think blagging is Imperative
but maybe that’s just me blagging