Giles is always very helpful when I'm working on collages. (I think he still has some YES paste in his tail.) And that's exactly what I spent most of the day today blissfully doing. There are some new things over at etsy to show for it. I was thinking as I was working about art vs. craft. In no way would I consider most of the visual stuff I do actual "art" in the way I consider my writing to be that. To me, I think what makes something art is that is SAYS something, even if it's just about the art form itself. I'm really most of the time making pretty things. Sometimes they're might be another layer (I'm thinking of a couple of series I was going for something in the way of statement), but lately and most of the time, I'm just making things I like--which is where the "craft" part comes in. I'm also thinking of how that word has been used in the past to demean the works of women or the more feminine arts. There's a fine line between art and decoration. Think of a still-life painted to look pretty, or a landscape then think of Monet's light studies, which are landscapes, but have something to say. Or quilts that told stories but were also used as decoration. What about architecture? What does it mean to have something to say?
I probably would say I'm always striving for artfulness in poems, but then maybe not. I know I've written things that were mainly meant to be pretty, to be fun, to be pleasing, but didn't say all that much. And maybe that's okay. Maybe it's the whole "poems" (with a lowercase p) vs. "POEMS". I've heard people say that poems aren't worth writing if they're not "important." What about enjoyment? My poems are typically only parts of a greater whole, be it a chapbook, or a book, or just my body of work. Mine is more a cumulative, fragmented, disjointed effect rather than a striving to write one great complete POEM (The Wasteland or The Odyssey or somesuch). No one is probably ever going to look at one of mine and say this is an important, single life changing poem. But maybe they'll say it about a book, or my work as whole. And that's not how I think of them, not one big, honking rock that lands on your head, but a collection of interesting stones, glinting and relecting off each other.
