Sunday, July 3, 2011
Carlo Gébler complains (see my post below) of the "the atrophy of community (writers have never been more marginal and their enterprise more quixotic and ridiculous)". He can't be talking about the poetry world, in which post-modern conditions have rendered traditional hierarchies meaningless, and in which writing and publishing is a shared, communal activity. As for his parenthetical aside; I think the aim of every writer should be to become quixotic and ridiculous.
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6 comments:
Well, if you want to be Important, but end up being Gebler, i suppose you might end up bitter. But what a stupid thing to want to be in the first place.
Well said, John
that seems to me to be what's wrong with everyone out there, too: they all suffer from a bad case of the fame game: "I wanna be famous and I wanna win all the prizes and I wanna get top billing at the next poetry reading & wanna wanna..."
Gebler's a whiner: shut up and write!
quickzotic and re:dickyoulust ?
heck ; I'm 2/2alf way there!
now. if. I. can. only. get. the speling &punkchewation down I can [....
....] entirely
Also: the fact that technology makes book production cheap and easy, and that many poets are graduates of, or teach in, creative writing departments, means that poets are encouraged to bring out collections when they're not really ready - to create a CV. A lot of new poetry books seem padded - a few good poems wrapped in filler. It's a shame, but it's the result of seeing poetry as a career (and poetry as a commodity).
Alan,
you might find Jacques Rancière's latest book "The Politics of Literature" interesting, especially Chapter 3: "The Putting to Death of Emma Bovary". Without getting into the specifics, I think we could say today it might be necessary to repeat that ritual slaying over and over.
Thanks Conrad, I'll check it out.
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