Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Concerning the heavy duty shit being brewed up poetically at lime tree (and I say that mostly out of trying to diffuse just how blown away I am by some of the ideas Kasey is getting at, or that I think he's getting at), I have a whole bunch opinions just waiting to be articulated, though the wait could be anywhere between 5 minutes and 5 years. I have to say however that there is a certain characteristic that maybe could be called obscurity I tend to find very attractive in all kinds of art. Alot of times the term "willful obscurity" is used to detract from poetry. But I don't really care if I understand something right away. I like it when something gives me the feeling of being taken to an unfamiliar place. And I don't know whether this person is going to offer me a ride back to point A or not. There's alot to more to catachresis, I suspect, than making a poetics from "not making sense", it does keep bringing me back to the idea that sometimes art does nessecarilly have to eschew sense, for the sake of breaking new ground, unfettered from repeating itself. Poets repeat themselves alot of course, but poems they make definitely have the capability of repeating themselves less.
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And I thought of the part in the Dylan documentary, where Bobby Neuworth claims that everyone's criteria back then was whether a piece of art or an artist had anything to say. Not that I'm constantly obsessing over Bobby Neuworth's aesthetics but I've heard this idea before and it's always kind of irritated me. I really don't care whether a poem has anything to say, that is in order for me to get some enjoyment out of it, it doesn't need to have a message like telling one to seize the day or commiserate with small furry mammals or go do the dishes. I'm with Frank, I don't care if you eat your vegetables. That is, the enjoyment you get out of something I make has nothing to do with whether you eat your vegetables. I can appreciate that kind of thing as a thematic element, like in alot of hip hop songs that contain a 'moral' or a 'lesson'. By all means, 'protect ya neck'. But it isn't essential that art tell you to do that, or anything else. It doesn't need to justify it's existence that way. I don't care whether this or that is 'earned'. "it doesn't matter whether we think the poet "really means" them; what matters is whether they get in our heads and make things happen there." Yep.

2 comments:

Kasey Mohammad said...

Mike, I think you probably said everything of substance I was trying to say, in a lot fewer words.

Mike Hauser said...

Cool.