Since I’ve been aggregating Tim’s writing for four years, lately I’ve been wanting to begin curating. For instance, I’d like to edit a small chapbook of his more recent poems. He said, “You are welcome to collect or archive or organize anything of mine you want. . . . [but] my stuff has no beginning, middle, or end where there's closure or a logical conclusion.” He thinks this is a fault. It’s been clear all along that school teachers, publishers, agents and editors have hounded Tim about the “bell curve” of writing structure: beginning, middle, end and all that. A school ma’rmy idea for an autodidact in a new age and a new medium. The old rules depended on linearity, hierarchy, classification, and all that curricular canon stuff.
I got to thinking about that. Suddenly the obvious came clear. I saw that being able to present, all at once, print, spoken word, image, video, narrative, metaphor, instrumental music is as much of a break-through as opera once was. I mean, for the first time the multi-gifted person who never did fit onto a bookshelf or a phonograph record or even a theatre stage, is free to stretch out and let ‘er rip. Luckily, the new audience does not require a plot or melody -- they are willing to accept a sequence of moments as pure experience and knit them together with their own emotional life. (Think what John Cage or Jackson Pollock or Andy Warhol have taught us.) The old limits and assumptions about what things ARE or (worse) OUGHT TO BE don’t matter to them. Curating for such an audience is an entirely different proposition.
“Blog” is short for “weblog” and was a response to the “hyperlink” which allowed a person to jump from one spot on the internet to another. The original idea was that when you went jumping along (like a frog on lilypads), you’d find great stuff that you’d like others to know about, so you’d keep a kind of log, like a ship’s log, of the islands you had visited. That’s one dimension. Another is more like a diary in which one records thoughts over a series of days, so the spacing is in terms of time. People seem to think of blogging as requiring great technical mystery, but it’s really very easy. (I do long-form, an essay a day.) It’s a very simple version of a website, because the formatting is all done for you. Just choose your template. (A website is custom designed and has more bells and whistles.) It needn’t be tweeting or sexting or any of the slightly dubious adolescent sorts of things the media tries to sensationalize in an attempt to wring money out of blogs.
Some of us have seized this new mixed-media, direct, always-in-process mode of communication and gleefully expanded it in much the same way that youngsters nowadays have jumped over all restrictions on what to think about and in what way. Many of them are autodidacts (sometimes of necessity since no school will have them), learn as you go, forget boundaries, give-me-passion, sensory-wink-and-nudge right alongside the most rarefied and crystalline classic theory. It’s all music to them, mashing, inventing, mocking, looping, fusing, reversing and reverberating. If you can think of it, why not do it?
How then does one keep order in one’s head, whether as creator or consumer? Keep furor and tumult from just being noise and mess? Themes. Tropes. Issues. Codes. Part sci-fi/part rock ‘n roll/part computer algorithm/part inside references to cult movies.
http://www.powells.com/review/2010_12_04 Review by Jill Owens. “At the beginning of Joanna Klink's third and newest book of poems, she defines the title, Raptus:
“(1) A state of rapture or furor. Also: an instance of this; a fit of intense emotion. (2) A seizure; a sudden or acute attack (as in a raptus of the blood, Impulsive Raptus, or Raptus Nervorum). (3) From rapio: A carrying-off by force. (4) A state of spiritual rapture marked by anesthesia. (5) A pathological paroxysm of activity giving vent to impulse of tension (as in an act of violence).
“These definitions serve as descriptions of and directions through the explosive, rapturous, anguished poems that follow.”
Consider the work of Art Durkee, a photographer, musician/composer, poet, and philosopher -- a unique individual choosing his own innovative way in life and sharing it on a set of blogs. The one I follow most is http://artdurkee.blogspot.com/ on which he constantly explains what he’s doing, how and why he chooses his processes. He follows my blog and is one of my most deeply perceptive commenters. I’ve never met him.
http://www.arthurdurkee.net/poetry05.html Art presents a sequence of poems based on classical Greek concepts, which sounds impressive and traditional but is so sensory that the informed brain soon swarms with new ideas and images, which is the point, isn’t it? Here are his titles: Veriditas (green truth), Kainos (new), Katabasis (the place of descent), Kenosis (emptiness), Apokatstasis (restoration), Kerygma (proclamation), Imago (image), Hesychia (stillness, rest), The words are a map to the provinces where psychiatry, sexuality and theology meet and play. He could add photos and music composed by himself. Read the poem, check firefox/safari/bing/yahoo/opera for associations, lie down to visit your own associations, then come back to read the poem again.
The point I’m trying to make is not that some individuals are talented in many different aspects and media -- true as that is. The point is that this is work that could not have been presented to others, shared around the planet, before there was such a thing as a blog. In fact, until people began to realize what could be done with this new linked-media-combining instrument, I’m not sure they worked this way. They composed, they painted, they acted -- but could they do it all in the same artwork? It’s a mistake to think of it as a book. A book has heft and smell and texture. It requires a font and illustrations. It was exciting when a reader device or an iPod would let you take along a whole library and orchestra, just walking down the street. But this is even more radical, planetary, outside the rules I used to teach in high school English. Language in words is only part of this new composite language. So is music, color, shape, movement.
And yet it’s not outside those old rules. We’re still using hyperbole (exaggeration), metonymy (one name substituted for another), synecdoche (a part to stand for the whole), malapropism (a word that’s not quite the conventional one), a metaphor or simile (kinds of comparison), personification and the other crowding host of rhetorical tricks our brains can play, except that now you can “say” a word is a musical phrase you’re hearing, a woman is a painting you are seeing, loneliness is a beautiful young man walking on the beach while faintly overlaid on that is a crowd of dancers and underlying that is a man speaking poetry that recalls his youth while an instrument plays. Onomatopoiea means you can mix a word like “bow-wow” with the sound of an actual dog bark or a cartoon of a dog or real dogs running. Catachresis (mixed metaphor) is no longer a fault but a strategy. It mixes not comparisons but mediums. This is the realm of autodidacts because there is no school prepared to teach it. Yet. There are few critics prepared to curate such work. Yet.
We don’t even know what to call it. How about “rapting?” Outside my window the sun is rapting frost-jeweled branches into floating feathers. What music should I suggest? What is the feeling, the reference to memory?
2 comments:
Thanks for the mention, and the linkage.
I don't know what to call it, either. I mostly just do it, without looking for a label. I mostly just call it being creative. Although I do like Joni Mitchell's term "crop rotation," which she uses to describe how she moves around creatively, and always does a period of painting after finishing an album.
"Raptus" reminds me of "ekstasis," and other terms that could be viewed as Dionysian.
Addendum, with reference to Tim's video pieces, and some of my own work:
I agree that the new media made this possible. I was thinking about multi-media presentation of my work before the technology made it really easy to do. It's a direction I've been moving towards for a long time.
I wrote a grant proposal in the early 90s (denied, BTW), in which I had envisioned a room in which to do a concert, in which many large back-illuminated photo prints would be on the side walls, like stained glass windows. There would be a place up front for the performers, which would include live music and poetry and acting. Projected behind that would be two more large "windows" with changing slides or videos being projected all the while. I actually did do an independent piece in Chicago at a theatre festival with a performance artist, where I played live music, and projected two slide shows side by side, while my partner, a performance artist, acted a monologue with props. The piece I wrote the grant to do was all my own material: music, words, art. I could do it now easier than back then, thanks to the technology.
So you're right, the technology of new media really does make more of this sort of work possible. I think what we're seeing is that some artists are doing what they've always envisioned, now that the tech makes it cheap and available to them TO do. It has certain;l;y put the creative tools in the hands of the masses; not too long ago, it was all still too expensive (hence the grant writing). NOw it's not.
I like seeing people move naturally into multi-channel creativity, now that they can. I think it opens up a lot of new possibilities, some of which we maybe still haven't even realized as yet. And I like very much being able to make my own multi-channel creative work now.. I've got a few short films to put together, when I can, and get them up on the Net. More on that later.
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