Talk Back: Why Do You Write Poetry?
I spent way too much time thinking about what I should include in my first piece back as an official member of the Perigee tribe. So much has happened since I was last involved. I moved to Reno, Nevada with my wife, Tami. I began teaching high school English, greeted my son into this crazy world, bought a stupid house, saw my wife take hold in the high desert (where there's not much to hold on to), started experimenting with oils, acrylics and aerosols, and founded a creative arts collective called BEtheCAUSE. I'll forgo any further minutia. (Of course, if you want some minutia, you can follow me on Twitter @BEtheCAUSE. or hit up my Facebook wall.)
The focus for my first piece, "A Few Angles on the Page/Stage Poetry Quandary," emerged just after a colleague of mine launched an online discussion about outsider art and the art academy called "Ignorant Art vs. The Academy," which began as a blog post and manifested as a cut & paste print discussion at a venue in Reno that displayed two amazing artists—one a graduate from The Art Center, and the other a self-taught illustrator. Both artists have depths of raw talent, but their revisions and honing of skills make their work worth the discourse.
The brass tacks of that dialogue: there are plenty of perspectives on the subject of academic programs for the arts and self-learned arts—in all forms. Dance, visual art, poetry, the blends of accepted practices and styles—and the blends frowned upon. But people should get busy doing what they feel they need to do (or love to do). If that's in a classroom or workshop, great. If that's in a garage or an ally somewhere, keep it up. One of my stipulations: you need to study those who created before you. You can't remain ignorant forever and still expect success.
That conversation was focused on visual art, but it reinvigorated the same issue for me in the context of poetry. So if you read "A Few Angles on the Page/Stage Poetry Quandary," please continue the dialogue here.
I'd love to learn your thoughts on this page/stage quandary. If anything I've included has made you respond, question, exclaim, or guffaw at all, then please ruminate some more—and then continue this discussion in this blog.
Why do you write poetry? What do you value in poetry? Why? Why do you read poetry? Should poets who perform give up submitting to journals/publishers that publish "mainstream" poets? Should some poets be barred from the stage?
Say something.
- Benjamin Arnold, Contributing Editor
The focus for my first piece, "A Few Angles on the Page/Stage Poetry Quandary," emerged just after a colleague of mine launched an online discussion about outsider art and the art academy called "Ignorant Art vs. The Academy," which began as a blog post and manifested as a cut & paste print discussion at a venue in Reno that displayed two amazing artists—one a graduate from The Art Center, and the other a self-taught illustrator. Both artists have depths of raw talent, but their revisions and honing of skills make their work worth the discourse.
The brass tacks of that dialogue: there are plenty of perspectives on the subject of academic programs for the arts and self-learned arts—in all forms. Dance, visual art, poetry, the blends of accepted practices and styles—and the blends frowned upon. But people should get busy doing what they feel they need to do (or love to do). If that's in a classroom or workshop, great. If that's in a garage or an ally somewhere, keep it up. One of my stipulations: you need to study those who created before you. You can't remain ignorant forever and still expect success.
That conversation was focused on visual art, but it reinvigorated the same issue for me in the context of poetry. So if you read "A Few Angles on the Page/Stage Poetry Quandary," please continue the dialogue here.
I'd love to learn your thoughts on this page/stage quandary. If anything I've included has made you respond, question, exclaim, or guffaw at all, then please ruminate some more—and then continue this discussion in this blog.
Why do you write poetry? What do you value in poetry? Why? Why do you read poetry? Should poets who perform give up submitting to journals/publishers that publish "mainstream" poets? Should some poets be barred from the stage?
Say something.
- Benjamin Arnold, Contributing Editor
Labels: Benjamin Arnold, issue 27, talk back
posted by Robert Woerheide at 12:40 PM
2 comments
We're proud to announce Susan Straight as our 2010 Fiction Contest guest judge. Straight is a novelist and National Book Award finalist whose numerous essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and Harper's Magazine. She is a frequent contributor to NPR and Salon.com. Straight's story "Mines," first published in Zoetrope: All Story, was included in Best American Short Stories 2003, and she's been awarded a Lannan Literary Award (2007) and an Edgar Allan Poe Award (2008). She is a professor at the University of California, Riverside.
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