The Critic's Guilt: Get Over It

The truth about art is: Good art is loved, it surprises and makes you happy, sad, or that perfect blending of both; bad art, on the other hand, is repulsive as dog shit or rotten eggs. The fact of the matter is, these outcomes (feelings) are all in the heart of the beholder, but the law is universal: If it repulses you, it's bad art - so don't feel bad for hating it.

That's right. For all of you in "workshops" who feel hard-pressed for something nice to say about a pile of turds dropped in front of you by an eager-for-praise puppy as if it's the newspaper or your slippers (their writing), don't feel bad for wanting to say, "This is horrible," or "This is tripe," or, "You have no talent," or "Why do you write," or, "You clearly are inspired ONLY by what your high school language teacher told you a poem / novel is." Does bad art make someone a bad artist? No, of course not; even Shakespeare struck out once in awhile. The feeling isn't rational - feelings seldom are. That doesn't mean they don't tell you something that's true, in this case, that the art before you isn't beautiful, edifying, strange or mysterious...rather, that it's a thorn in your private areas.

Of course, we want to encourage fellow writers, not discourage, so nobody wants to say, This poem is less interesting than my eczema. But wait, do we not want to say it, or do we know the other does not want to hear it; do we know the other members will chastise the messenger for the message? To be honest, that honesty bubbles and boils up inside me every time I read about a babbling brook or the moon in June. You know what that makes me? (A jerk, an asshole, a heartless know-it-all?) It makes me HUMAN. I am repulsed by something unattractive, something noxious; evolution has given me instincts that drive me away from the source of disgust, and told me to avoid it, at all costs, in the future; this, it is logically assumed, is to my benefit, this instinct. So why do I keep going back?

The friendship. The camaraderie. The shared love of literature, words, the common goal of creating beautiful word-objects, images, sounds, experiences to transcend the daily world. That's why you don't say those nasty phrases burning their holes in the back of your throat or your temporal lobe, to preserve the social support of a writer's workshop.

The moral of the blog post is: If you hate bad art, find yourself retching in its presence and wanting to punch the cliches in their pregnant bellies, fret not, dispel your shame. My friend and fellow sufferer, you are human, pricked and bleeding; smile at that wonderful fact, the fact of your vivacity, and tell your brother-in-rhymes: I really like that you made the roses red and describe the birds as feathery.

Addendum:
I felt, to prevent counterargument to the fact, that it's important to consider taste. In order to trust one's feelings of repulsion versus love (or its components) one must first refine his or her palate, must first view multiple and variable individual pieces and acquire a sense of what's right or wrong in the art form, prior to gauging Good versus Bad; a degree of intelligence is probably required as well (unless I'm wrong and Duck Dynasty is truly Great Art).

American Buddhist Poets (and a thought on "favorites")

Every time I read her, I appreciate more and more the art of Jane Hirshfield. I own "Given Sugar, Given Salt," and I've read her countless times in the past when she's appeared in Poetry. She is very much a transcendental writer - she writes about mysterious things, shares a mysterious knowledge that I think can only be created. It's hard to pin down, but it feels like matters of the soul, the animas of religion.

This morning I revisited W.S. Merwin, who in the past has been a bit too gentle, or genteel, for my taste. I like things to explode a bit off the page, and I especially did a year ago - think the fireworks of those NY writers: O'Hara, Ashbery, Koch; think of the Beats, especially Ginsberg. My taste, my aesthetic sensibility, has refined a bit, and has actually become MORE inclusive, and today I really appreciated nearly every line I read in my rediscovery of Merwin. I own "Migrations: New and Selected Poems," a National Book Award winner.

The American Buddhists - Merwin, Hirshfield - transcend our five (actually six) sense experience (the sixth is proprioception) and create new knowledge, mine the mystery they create, providing a beauteous wonder. Last night I lay in bed reading about God, people's thoughts about God throughout history. I can accept God as existing in the mysteries of life, residing in the unknowable, residing in art. I observed recently in my life, art is what occupies my mind in between study and survival, in between my time with others and my time at work (as a physician), which includes study time, reading up on contemporary scientific discovery and innovation. There are those moments of solitude - after waking, before bedtime, a lunch break - that are filled, decisively, by art; experiencing art or pondering art, or both.

Paying attention to my own attention - meta-attention - I notice my "favorite" pieces are those I relate to. So often their subject matter are young, sensitive men: Keats' Ode on Melancholy, Stevens' The Snow Man, Hamlet, and most recently, Willa Cather's "Paul's Case." (Apparently, according to this link, "A Study in Temperament.") http://www.shsu.edu/~eng_wpf/authors/Cather/Pauls-Case.htm. I read it during a lull in my nursery call. What this means to me, as a writer and reader, is that "favorite" should evolve as you evolve, and really doesn't speak to the quality of the art work. I'm not sure of the other repercussions; I haven't ruminated much yet on it. But I think it is important to note. And I don't think it's faulty to have favorites, not at all. Perhaps I'll write more on this in the future.

Recommendations: Hirshfield, Merwin, "Paul's Case"

Really System Issue One published a poem of mine!

New poem published at Really System: http://reallysystem.org/issues/one/stasis_in_ragtime/

The journal has a great, friendly editor who asked that I encourage all my writer friends to submit their work for issue 2, so get to it guys!

This is an interesting piece for me: it’s the first I wrote after finishing my first book and taking several months off. It’s a rondeau, an underutilized form, in my opinion. Paul Laurence Dunbar (Dayton’s native son) has a famous one, We Wear the Mask: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173467

Another famous one, probably more well-known, is In Flanders Field by John McCrae: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19464

I’m happy with this poem, and after it was written I read it at Bess Embers’ poetry circle (at that time at Kettering’s Library on Far Hills). That June Saturday afternoon another poet there asked what inspired it, saying she was especially moved by the image of the horse in the air. I said I had been watching the news around the time of the Moore, OK tornado this past spring, and I felt, as a poet, one of my tasks was to “bear witness to my time,” and “testify” to present and future readers. It was going to be a theme behind my burgeoning, inchoate second book, bearing witness to current events, etc. Well, that poet really liked the idea, and came back with a sonnet of her own based on that image and idea the next month. (I remember a friend’s reaction, having been present for mine and hers: “Whoa.”) She’s an award-winning poetess, so I recommend checking out this month’s Mock Turtle Zine (http://mockturtlezine.com/online-issue/) if you want to see a fine example of sonneteering. The title may clue you in.

And on a sort of random note, while we’re talking poetry, there’s an interesting article on the Poetry Foundation website by Ruth Graham this month, about a certain trend that emerged in 2013: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/247130

(I feel compelled to mention the other poet's piece so that when mine is read it isn't presumed I heard the image from her, as mine was the second to be published. The feelings are only mildly hard, as intimated by the timely Poetry essay.)

Quick addition to the "falling in love" post

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”

This is a great Elie Wiesel quote (first heard by me in a Lumineers song). I think if one is viewing art in a form they aren't accustomed to - i.e. almost everybody's experience reading poetry, even some people who write it - then the best way to gauge whether it's "good" or not is 1) how much it "grabs" you (catches your attention and holds it), or, the other end of the spectrum, 2) how much it leaves you indifferent to it, that is, how little your mind returns to it, or how quickly it discards the sensory data (information, art object) and moves on to something different. 

So my advice to novice audience-members of any art form is - just go with the flow; experience the art. If you can't escape it afterward, if it resides in your mind after you're no longer viewing it, it's 'subjectively' (you being the subject) "good"; if you forget about it, it was "bad." 

What irks me is hearing other poetry writers / readers laud every poem they see...not EVERY poem they see, not the poems people they know have written, but the poems on websites or in books or journals, because they assume some authority has deemed it a "good poem" and that they, the readers, aren't good enough yet to tell what is good on their own. It took me a couple years to learn there is no such thing as an objectively good poem; the poems that live on are considered "good" by a vocal and powerful few, and then are accepted as good by the unwitting or naive majority (namely college students or retirees). Fortunately, if you stay with poetry, you'll see some of these vocal and powerful few were actually right, or their tastes agree with yours (I often find myself agreeing with Bloom on matters of aesthetics; if I were a critic I'd champion Crane, Stevens, Ashbery and Dickinson, too), but first you have to stop thinking everything is great. Poetry is like TV, Hollywood movies, pop music - 99.9% of it is CRAP. (See Sturgeon's Law.) 

For me, what's attention grabbing is still what's new, so I think the only critic who's ever remained valuable to me is Pound; fascist, anti-semitic Pound. If you want to know how to read, read http://www.amazon.com/ABC-Reading-New-Directions-Paperbook/dp/0811218937

Three New Poems Published...

Great journal. Includes my play on the abecedarian (look where the letters are :) ), a sonnet for one of my best friends (just engaged) in a sonnet form I invented, and some Sapphics I wrote for my nuclear family (pets included!):

http://www.foliateoak.com/jacob-sheff.html

Two new publications

A poem I wrote almost exactly two years ago when I was still finding my footing:

http://www.cricketonlinereview.com/vol9no2/17-jake-sheff-okay-with-obsolescence.php

Three poems I wrote this past year:

http://thehouroflead.com/issues/issue-1/jake-sheff/

(Shared 21 times on Facebook! Exciting :) )

Viewing great art is falling in love

I don't know that the supposition in my header is true, but it seem rational based on a couple of principles I've accepted, some ideas that I gathered from my experiences.

The first idea, that I've stated here several times, is that great art is the art which captures our imagination. To say that another way, it holds our attention, it's visually catchy. It's infectious.

The second idea is a truth I've become aware of just recently: That the act of giving attention is the (one of the?) essential act(s) of love. As a parent, pet owner, friend, I realize what separates whom I care about from strangers is that I pay attention to their lives, AND it's their attention I want. Often a pet will do something loud - cry, make something fall off a ledge - and when I look I see them looking at me, and I say, "Emma, I see you," as if I know that's what they wanted. For me to see them. And what child does not look to see, while playing a toy drum for example, if their parent is watching them? Or while spinning until they fall, will not peek to see if mother sees them being silly? The child and pet depend on the mature person, and they want to know they're loved by feeling their attention. I'd say adults do this with each other to - having another's attention makes you feel cared about, important to someone other than yourself. We want someone other than ourselves to pay attention to ourselves. Hence Facebook, hence blogs ;)

I think I fall short of arguing adequately for attention being an act, possible the act, of love. But in my experience this seems true. And applying this knowledge to my daily interactions at work and home has strengthened my relationships recently, I think. It's practical. That's why I'm a stickler for empirical knowledge lately.

So if idea one and two are true (they may not be for you - they seem very much so for me), then the act of viewing something that holds your attention (great film, great song, great painting) is sort of like love at first sight, the sensation / feeling of it. And who doesn't say about their favorite anything, "I LOVE that movie / song / etc!"

It seems so obvious, but spelled out like that, it's pretty interesting.