Lacan 28

Lacan 28

If your poetry was genuinely good, wouldn’t it make you healthier? Wouldn’t it
make your town, your culture, your species, the planet, healthier,
at least spiritually? If it doesn’t and you continue to produce it,
what does that say about your world view?

I’m not saying that increased “consciousness,” or its sister, “awareness,”
is articulated and clear and paraphrasable. The terms consciousness and awareness
only really refer to “the apprehension” of the existence of something; they do NOT
have to refer to some thoroughly refined and long percolated condensation
of a given thing. I’m only saying that it, whether consciousness or awareness,
by definition, is GOOD, and always has been. It may be consciousness
of “worth,” “dignity,” “merit,” for instance, and the precise meaning of that
may not be paraphrasable, but wouldn't it, nonetheless, always make you healthier.
Let’s say it makes you laugh, maybe A LOT. And you cannot explain the laughter,
exactly, but geez, just the laughing, I take that to be GOOD,
don’t you? Healthy, don’t you think? Whether you can explain why or how
or not.

But there are those who say, and will say, “Oh, well it was a good idea
but ‘bad’ poetry.” Because they’re experts at that – calling such and such “Bad
poetry.” That’s what they do; they call stuff Bad poetry.
They contribute Nothing. Their whole thing, their entire game,
trope, “expertise,” what have you, is the calling of such and such “Bad poetry.”

That’s ALL. And they don’t think they’re wasting your time.
They think their thing is valuable, necessary, useful, desirable,
dignified, but all they really do, the only thing they really, actually do
is gain or retain attention for themselves (and, yes, of course it’s nothing
but useless negative attention, at least most of the time). And that’s ALL.
That’s all that they do. Calling such and such “Bad poetry,”
if you’re really, really “good at it,” is big business and big attention.
In other words, you can get great big bucks and great big fame,
if that’s what you love so much.

Now, NO, of course I am not saying that your poetry cannot be negative
in the sense of alerting everybody to what sucks in the world.
Of course not. And of course that is GOOD and necessary
and valuable, too. Increase consciousness and awareness of what sucks
in the world. That, TOO, is necessary. But shouldn’t that, wouldn’t that,
also make you healthier, too?

And happier. Wouldn’t it make you happier? If you write for years and years
and you don’t get happier, what on earth are you writing?
Or writing for?

But then there are those who insist that they are contacting, observing,
reporting, witnessing true reality, and it ain’t pretty, they say,
grim as all get-out and get-up and giddy-yup. And year after year
after year. What does that say about “the real World?” Who are they trying
to fool? It’s their “world,” and maybe it’s unique, which is
in itself a very good thing -- being unique -- but it’s just their world determined
by their world view determined by their poetics determined by maybe some genetic
disposition to repeat the same old “poetic” themes, maybe, but seriously,
I do think it’s fair to ask, does it make you healthier?

---

“Oh, but I’m not going to write THAT poem! Then I’d lose my health coverage!”

“Oh, but I’m not going to paint THAT picture. Then the government would come
after me and I’d lose my health coverage!”

“Oh, but I couldn’t possibly teach them to write novels like THAT
in my Creative Writing classes! Then the Dean would take away my Creative Writing
classes and make me an Adjunct for life!”

---

“No, as a matter of fact, he never did live on the shadier side
of town, shoot heroin, or spend some years in South America. One time
he did get a postcard from the middle east, or from Israel, actually,
but other than that, he was a Creative Writing instructor at the University
and his wife and her parents didn’t want him to lose their health insurance.”

---

Well, the thing about American Poetry and American Literature for the past
eighty or so years -- imagism, objectivism, for instance,
but even the exceedingly and tediously “straight” poetics
of the 20th Century, “objective correlative” and “poetry should not say, but be,”
etc., and the simple but deadly oppressive “show, don’t tell”
shoved down the throats of already enormously humiliated and repressed
fiction writing class students -- is that everything has been
exhaustingly and maybe also exhaustively dominated by out-of-control
and largely unconscious adherence to unquestioned and untouchable allegiance
to Objectivity,
regardless that that so-called objectivity has often been a ruse, a game,
a trope, a program, a false divinity, a delusion, a tyranny,
an authoritarian value when overarching, an at best temporal be-all-and-end-all,
a motto and a model and a no-tell motel.

Kill the personal! Kill the Self! Kill those subjectivities! Kill the splits
between subject and object, human and World, inherent in the very doctrine(s)
of Objectivity! We’ve been instructed like this for almost a century or so now,
and much of it has been fabulous instruction, but perhaps it’s gone too far
and too long and dried up access to other phenomena of “the World”
that needs to be apprehended, contacted, actualized, created, too.
Or not.
I dunno.
I’m just a dumb fuck who’s never taken a Creative Writing class in his entire life,
and I am frequently and unabashedly (though also histrionically and disingenuously
and desperately apologetic about it) personal and self-absorbed,
at least as much as the next fella or femme, to be sure.