One thing I like about writing in a blog is that it is dated, both literally (the time-stamp) and figuratively (it expresses what you happen to be thinking at the time). In this respect, it seems more representative of real life than most texts in other media/genres.
Nowadays, in the era of climate emergency, thinking long-term is looking less and less tenable. Writing for posterity looks even more ridiculous than it ever has. If you’re writing for anyone, it’s the people in the present. This was always true, of course, but it used to be that one’s sense of the world included a narrative that extended well beyond one’s personal demise. That narrative is now in question, to say the least. We’re walking off the front doorstep into the fog w/o any sense that the next step will be underneath. We’ve been taught that great art should be a monument for the ages: if people aren’t memorizing and reciting a poem hundreds of years after its composition, then it is a failure. It has not “stood the test of time,” as we say. It’s hard to quote John Ashbery, though, because so much of his poetry is about time slipping away and the present evaporating as you speak it into being – about the evanescence of monumenality. Memorizing particular lines of an Ashbery poem in order to freeze them is precisely beside the point. But there are other ways to dwell in the present, in one’s art, besides thematizing time’s passing. Performance art is one obvious example (esp. if one does not record it in any manner). Or compose a poem, memorize it, recite it to others, then forget it. Even Robert Smithson’s earthworks are designed to disappear, albeit on a longer time-line. The term “occasional poem” could be the opposite of “masterpiece.” An occasional poem is written for an occasion, not for eternity. Of course, occasional poems have been taken up by subsequent generations – esp. if they are allegorical or symbolic enough to be re-articulated to other times and places (at how many weddings have portions of Spenser’s “Epithalamion” been read?). But there are some works that flop down so far into the weeds of the fleeting moment that they can’t be fished out, except by those of us who want to flop down into the overgrown past. I’ve mentioned, from time to time, the necessity of relinquishing our own immortality. This is esp. difficult for Americans, who always believe in a happy ending, and for whom a happy ending always means continuing to live as they have been living. The Anthropocene epoch (or the Anthropic period of the Holocene) is all about death – another mass extinction that may include our own species. This is an excellent opportunity to meditate upon transience and impermanence. One way to do that is via writing – either by reflecting upon the temporality of all flesh, or by mimicking the torrential rush of events, moment to moment. Whatever the method, anything that helps us talk ourselves into the present and out of the fiction of the future will be salubrious.
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |