Quick note on motivation
The "Moving" (and other) posts are partly a creative and/or political mini-experiment of sorts. They're not poetry, but neither are they attempts to elicit sympathy. Not to discount your kindnesses. Not at all! But if these posts were merely about me, I'd never have the gall to publish them. What I'm interested in here is something like confessionalism outside the traditional ArtBox (even as, with this statement, I'm inevitably seeking refuge inside the Box). I'm interested in your discomfort and mine and what that says about the ways in which Art corrals or neutralizes the Real. I'm interested in pushing back against the several booming voices that have tried to blot the personal out of informal writing by deploying shame against its authors. Given how utterly ignorable most blogs are--this one included--the fear, aggression, and disgust expressed by those who hold themselves out to be More Relevant Than Thou seems to point to something more consequential than mere boredom. That's not a dig at people who choose remain impersonal. It's simply a response to those who militantly believe impersonality is the only valid mode of expression in this medium.
Of course, some of those voices object to the personal in poetry too--but not all of them. Which brings us back to the Box--a perennial poetic concern, and a topic on which I don't mind repeating myself. How does one keep one's Art from serving as a neat container for the messiness of being human? Is such a thing even possible? Are the various arts merely feel-good exercises devoid of any meaning beyond their capacity to evoke appreciation? If so, how does one explain the difficulty and confusion, the work involved in the experience, that some artists and some audiences not only consent to, but seek out?
These are all big questions to which I have no ready answers, though my instinct is to push against the walls of the container and see what happens. Therefore, my life and my self are the raw materials that go into this thing, but ultimately it's about whatever the people who read here take away from it. I don't have any specific hopes or designs for what that something is. In fact, I usually try to avoid thinking about it. To date I don't think I've pushed all that hard, but I am trying to figure out how one cultivates fearlessness without developing callouses.
