Arts Wants To Be Seen

You can pretend to indifferent, argues Adam Kirsch, but writing is premised on the hope of a readership:

Literary history knows of writers who have come to the very edge of oblivion: Kafka ordered his executor to burn his manuscripts; Dickinson left her hundreds of poems in a chest of drawers. But even Kafka and Dickinson gave enough signs of literary existence to the outside world that their posthumous discovery became possible, perhaps even inevitable. Such writers played a game of hide-and-seek with posterity, which may look like modesty in comparison with many artists’ blatant self-promotion, but which can also be considered a form of seduction. Surely they would have been dismayed if their tricks had worked too well and no one had ever read them at all.

Nor should this be considered a symptom of egotism or frailty. For the truth is that there is something in the act of creation that presses forward into the public realm, whether the artist goes on to seek publicity or not. To write a poem or paint a picture is to translate inner experience into outward form and presence; it is to objectify sensation, and the definition of an object is that it can be passed from hand to hand, its shape fixed for everyone. To want to be an artist without creating such an object is a contradiction in terms. And once the object is created, it wants to be seen, just as a flower or a wave wants to be seen. Art is a form of communication, and communication cannot be totally autonomous, just as there can be no such thing as a private language.

Death Is Not The End

Remembering the late American poet Rachel Wetzsteon, Adam Kirsch reflects on an immensely promising career cut short:

The manner of her death—she committed suicide, on Christmas Eve—has had the paradoxical effect of making her at once better known and less understood. More people have probably heard Wetzsteon’s name after her death than while she was alive; the poet-suicide is an archetype we understand all too well, and she seemed to fit it neatly. Yet this fame, such as it is, has not yet provoked much serious critical attention to her poetry. (In 2009 the New York Times published her obituary, but it had not yet reviewed any of her books.) Even now, the sense lingers that Wetzsteon’s work is not complete, that it is not yet time to start assessing her achievement. To acknowledge that in fact her achievement really is complete, because there will never be much more to her body of work than we already have, is thus a recognition of tragedy. But it is also a recognition of Wetzsteon’s success. For the truth is that, in her four books, she established her mastery over a style and a set of themes in a way that only true poets manage to do.

David Yezzi ponders the effect of Wetzsteon's death on the poems she left behind:

Some poems grow on us over time; others are diminished. Occasionally, we embrace a poem beyond criticism, beyond its value as literature; we internalize it for its life-value. Some poems synchronize with our breath, take root in our hearts, where they assume a private and indelible meaning. Death is not the end when a poet dies. What we dearly miss is everything they have to tell us about the minutiae of life, about head colds and deadlines, restaurants and articles, embarrassments and triumphs. And gossip, always gossip—about our doings and others’. But the poems keep talking. They talk with even greater clarity and power, in fact, because they are no longer in process. They are finished. Yet like all good art, they continue to unfold, have things to say, even new things to say that we hadn’t heard before.

Bukowski's World

Zach Wells' comment on my Tuesday post brought to mind Adam Kirsch's excellent essay in the New Yorker from 2005 where he brilliantly, and somewhat mercilessly, exposes the nature of Bukowski's appeal:

Such poems offer the same kind of vicarious wish fulfillment that differently inclined readers might find in spy novels or gangster movies, with their parodies of unbound masculinity. (In one poem, Bukowski acknowledges this affinity, boasting: “don’t believe the gossip: / Bogie’s not dead.”) And Bukowski is best read as a very skillful genre writer. He bears the same relation to poetry as Zane Grey does to fiction, or Ayn Rand to philosophy—a highly colored, morally uncomplicated cartoon of the real thing. He has two of the supreme merits of genre writing, consistency and abundance: once you have been enticed into Bukowski’s world, you have the comfort of knowing that you won’t have to leave it anytime soon, since there will always be another book to read.