But isn’t all writing about uncertainty? We enjoy unforeseen plot twists, unexpected language; and calling a book “predictable” is a put-down. And as Frost said of poetry: “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” Even those who cherish the kind of poetry that affirms what they already think they know enjoy a fresh turn of phrase.
In terms of audience – well, there’s the Romantic notion of writing as self-expression (“Let that boy boogie-woogie – it’s in him, and it’s got to come out!”). This model implies the unimportance of the audience – it only involves the writer; the reader is a secondary consideration. Certain “high” modernists, in turn, saw the art object as “autotelic” – a self-sufficient entity that is its own excuse for being, regardless of whether anyone sees or reads it (“A poem should not mean but be”). And postmodernist writing is often premised on the idea that language has a life of its own – or that communication is always fundamentally miscommunication – meaning that there is nothing really for the reader to “get” – nor communication for the space aliens to receive (tho they may have implanted language as a virus). So, during the industrial age, as the economy became more and more carbon-based, the writers and artists were already preparing for the demise of the audience – albeit not in the way they anticipated. There are other strains of literary history, of course – a more “pro-social” type, whether radical left or comfortably conservative. Both the Schoolroom poets and the Proletarian poets are inconceivable without an audience. The poets of the New Negro Renaissance often seem to be writing for a community, at least as much as for themselves. And the political poetry of today – docupoetry, poets read the news, poetry of witness, etc. – is fundamentally dependent on at least the idea of a potential audience. And poets do have an audience, for now – one another. For as long as printing presses and the internet can keep operating (which may be less time than we think). So, considering the here and now – the people in your family, coterie, club, workplace, town, era – this is one reason to continue to write, even as the water rises or dries up. Another reason: as pure, existential activity – as a way of staying in the present, affirming the reality of the present, and accepting the perpetual unreality of the past and future. I believe that history and climate science are crucially important. But ontologically, the past is a mess of memories and documents (some of them faulty or lying); and the future is an hypothesis (I could be dead tomorrow; we could be dead tomorrow, with the right virus, warhead, asteroid, or super-volcano). This was always-already the case. So in a sense, we are already writing in the shadow of the falling boulder – the unfolding climate catastrophe is merely bringing it to our consciousness (some of us). Perhaps, like Seneca’s potter or Thoreau’s staff-maker, the artists and writers should continue what they’re doing for the sake of doing it – and perhaps do it with more, not less, care. Quantity and efficiency matter less to the dying; likewise, maybe the notion of a “professional” writer is an anachronism or a contradiction in terms, in the Anthropocene. But pottery, staff-making, and writing are ways to cope with the unthinkable future, while staying grounded in the present – even if they do nothing to alter that present or future in any substantive way. And then there’s everybody else. Does the writer keep writing when people around her are dying preventable deaths? Or when the crops are shriveling up? If you believe such things as virtue, morality, or ethics, can you fulfill the duties or imperatives it lays upon you merely by writing? Or, should the art take a back seat to defending, interpreting, curing, growing, sewing, well-digging?
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
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. |