Last night found us at a short film screening with a company J has started doing some marketing work for in addition to his regular DJ-ing work. It was about alcoholism and accountability, and fit very well into their mission of making films that have weighty subject matter examined in new ways. All along and all the way home, I was thinking about art and its role in this terrible, terrible, world that is also, quite deceptively very beautiful sometimes. About power and change, and how art is a statement whether it has a clear cut message or no.
It's been easy to feel, and I know its not just me, that as creatives, what we create does not do much beyond, at its most basic level, distract. Or at its best, entertain. Maybe its just me as a poet. and a very specific poetry related thing. During Covid, and after, even though I was writing steadily as the year ended, it felt very much for naught. Like, who cares about poems when the refrigerator trucks are lining up to haul away the bodies because there are too many to store? When, you're hit with a wave of fear on public trans with every sniffle or cough, distracted so much you can't even take solace in reading on the bus anymore (or really any other time.) The day my book SEX & VIOLENCE arrived in my mailbox from the publisher, downtown Chicago had been on fire the night before and basically closed off for traffic after rioting. There was a city-wide curfew for the next couple of weeks and I spent those days methodically going through the motions of what library work I could do at home.
The arts of course, were also hit horribly by the pandemic, though I am noticing fuller movie screenings and sold out theater productions these days, so hopefully things are on the rise. As for writing, it seems harder to gain traction, either because of attention spans and social media and everyone pulled in a million different directions. Writing, at least creative writing, especially for me in 2021 when I was still working full-time, and even a little while afterward, felt useless and superfluous. It's something, as I edited the RUINPORN mss I realize I was obsessively hashing out in all those memoir in bone & ink poems written in the spring of 2022.
But of course, that series ends with the line, "What use for padlocks and handcuffs, when we were staying all along?" In those months, I was writing more and more for money, some of them, according to back end stats, with thousands more readers than any of my creative work. I was thinking of how I may need to pivot to other genres just to make ends meet. I was plotting writing genre fiction as a more passive income string in addition to my content writing. But I'd read the poems, the ones I'd written, and somehow was still writing, and would love them so much more. Eventually I moved past it, saving my other types of writing as a journey, not an escape route.
In times like these, the most unprecedented (though many would say it holds the ghosts of authoritarian regimes past like the scent of something burning) it seems writers may be able to communicate what other things fail to. Maybe not poetry or fiction, but at least the words on the page or screen. I try to think about the times when the words, not really the creative ones, had made changes or garnered something more than their own existence. The national award the library won. The messy previous application dossiers written by librarians who were terrible at project management and making something readable and visually appealing. (I did not do it entirely alone, but mostly it was me, with the help of one other department co-worker as a sounding board and a student staffer who provided illustrations that made us stand out enough to tip us into first place.)
When the head of the organization who granted the award showed up for the swanky celebration, she responded with something like "Oh,. of course, you had a poet write it." I like to think it was just a compliment, but looking around at the shabby, definitely not state of the art spaces and limited resources, the tiny staff that is even tinier now, I realized that my application had made it look beautiful, like maybe putting a lipstick on a pig. A sparkling of fairy godmother dust in the form of words. For a long time, maybe even I believed them myself. Poetry sometimes lies. Most of things we created, the idea of a library as artist community and resource, the focus weeks, the digital exhibits, the programming, went out the door with me.. What made us distinctive swallowed in one gulp by my leaving and my co-curator beholden to other stuff as a department head.
But in those few years, another award app we wrote and won had a cash prize we got to keep. After a job level classification, I drafted a letter of appeal that actually bumped up our departments classification, but that never actually bore any fruit in getting us raises or new titles. (this also one of the reasons I left.) But the words had power, that under better circumstances for the college, may have paid off. As someone who wrote poems that were like little whirlwinds of leaves, this felt like a windstorm. Almost like spells and witchery.
But then again, my favorite way to think of poems is as little spells. As incantations that conjure something, even just a feeling. A whisp of memory. A nuggets of sense-making substance. I think this may be where those minimalist insta poets succeed. In creating a little spell to hang onto,. even if its just sentiment or cliched slightly that fits the moment. Perhaps this is who poetry gets trotted out like the red-headed stepchild at weddings and funerals. I got really excited a few weeks back when my tattoo artist and I were talking books, and she mentioned wanting to read more poems because she was loving Rupi Kaur. It was like a strange poetry thing spotted in the wild when I usually only hear poets talk about poetry. It was like a glimmer, a little whirlwind of dust rising off the ground.
