Last week, a reader commented on our earlier "Notes From The Air" post...
Wow, that Orr essay really strikes me as fatuous, as though poetic "greatness" is an exclusive Hamptons country club into which, after much sniffing over by the navy double-breasted blazered Orrs of this world, one might eventually be admitted. His remarks on Milosz strike me as especially trolly snark, as it betrays a glib ignorance of the profound sweep of history. Orr dismisses (if he's even aware of it) Milosz's witnessing of WWII and subsequent Communist rule in Poland, the profound impact those enormous soulkilling events and forces had on the individual human spirit, and Milosz's proper role as a poet in documenting them.
I think Orr's asking the wrong question, or perhaps (this is the NY Times, after all) maybe it's precisely the right question for the commercial publishing world. "Greatness" with its cachet sells even poetry, after all.
But the chase after aesthetic greatness - what a way to stifle, perhaps even permanently, one's creativity. Even Ashbery seems to refer to it, in the YouTube you posted on 2/10 (the poem Once Upon a Time There Were Two Brothers):
As I aged
increasingly, I also grew more charitable
with regard to my thoughts and ideas,
thinking them at least as good as the next man’s.
Then a great devouring cloud
came and loitered on the horizon, drinking it up, for what seemed like months or years.
I like what Elizabeth Gilbert has to say about nurturing creativity, and how she found a way to quell her fears and anxieties about expectations as to her further creative expressions (after her bestselling memoir). I think her take is really great (wonderful punchline - ole!), and I'm finding it personally very encouraging and reassuring.
Anonymous
February 25, 2009
Morning, Looking East Over the Hudson Valley from the Catskill Mountains
Frederic Edwin Church, 1848, Albany Institute of History & Art Collection
3 comments:
Here's the link to Elizabeth Gilbert's talk, entitled "A different way to think about creative genius."
http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html
Here's another perspective on quiet literary greatness and standing, as distinguished from fanfare ("preposterously afflicted self-adoring, frankly career-geniuses")...
http://maudnewton.com/blog/?p=9216
Don’t be afraid. Don’t be daunted. Just do your job. Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever your piece of it may be.
If your job is to dance, do your dance.
If the divine cockeyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed for just one moment through your efforts, then ¡Olé!
And if not, do your dance anyhow, and olé to you nonetheless…
Olé to you nonetheless.
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