It is funny how in certain moments of one's life various previously defining moments can be seen with such clarity you have to wonder how it was you didn't see them before. I woke this morning and had coffee. I sat down to check and recheck the story of mine being published shortly. As I was doing this, I had an image of myself, two images really, light up in front of my eyes: the first, a young republican preppy me who believed that being an artist was something important but something to be hidden, and the second, a black-clad me wearing army boots and a motorcycle jacket who believed that Art was everything. One of these versions of me, the conservative me, existed out of fear, I think. The second, existed out of a lack of fear, a blind belief in the resistance to hegemony. Between these two versions of myself stood one class, a seminar on Deviance and Social Control, taught by Stephen Pfohl.
That class introduced me to the ways in which some parts of society have effected marginalization of others throughout history. It taught me how Art was not a celebration of life but an active assertion of the individual imagination, that the making of Art was a stand against the collective despite the fact it reaffirmed the universality of the human imagination. What does it mean to be influenced by image, to be seduced by the simulacra created by the King, by governments, by their modern-day equivalent, the multinational corporations? What does it mean to work alone, in your studio, at your desk, in a darkroom? This class flooded my brain, made me reconsider so many things I had taken for granted because of my upbringing.
By the time I left college, I wore the black-clad outfits less. I had internalized much of it. I didn't need to wear it because I learned by then that my mind and my actions demonstrated these things better than an outfit. And still, the me that exists today could never have come into existence had it not been for Stephen Pfohl. My belief in Art and the making of Art as a political act is a direct result of what I learned in that time. It is also why I am not a big believer in "schools" of poetry, camps. To actively seek out such camps, to actively belong to a school, is to conform. And I cannot
choose to conform.
Yes, people construct narratives for artists, place them into groups, etc. But these groups and camps tend to stick only when those people are dead and cannot resist. Does this mean I am not a gay poet? No. Does it mean I have no allegiance to Asian-American or Latino poetry? No. But I actively resist being labeled. Of course I am labeled by others. But there is a difference between others labeling you and you labeling yourself.
But this is no argument against community. Such an argument is akin to resisting family. But like much in the life of artists, it is about the mind. Family/Community helps us, it nourishes us, but it cannot BE us. Family/Community helps care for the body, but it cannot be a substitute for the individual mind confronted with the world and the desire the artist has to recreate the world, speak to it, demolish it in an attempt to capture some essence others may not have seen or registered. I know I am a result of the books I have read, the philosophy I have studied, the minds I have encountered. I know I am a product of studying Aristotle and Kant, Descartes and Baudrillard, Augustine and Lacan. But when I sit down to write, when I am deeply inside the poem or story, it is not only a moment of creation but a moment of resistance. What makes an artist dare to create? What makes him or her believe that what they are doing matters? That intoxicating moment, what some in sports call the zone, is addictive. It is what draws many of us back again and again regardless of how long it has been since we last created anything. It is like a drug, that moment when most everything around you seems inconsequential. It is an act of hubris at the same time it is an act of rebellion. I believe this.
I know a few of you have written to me about how unpleasant my whining about lack of time is here and on Facebook, that it is boring. But this is what I am talking about. Normally, I am so weighed down by responsibilities I cannot think, think deeply. And for me, that thinking is essential, is a prerequisite for me to write. As much as I believe in craft, as much as I teach it when I teach my graduate students, craft is not enough. A good craftsman is a good craftsman. But it takes an act of mind, an act of will to be an artist. I believe that. Could I sit down and draft something in between things at the hospital? Sure. Could I tinker with this or that at night before bed? Sure. But the thinking, the deep thinking that generates all the connections deep inside the line or sentence would not be there. Just having the past two days off has amazed me in terms of how much I am able to think. Yes, I know it may just be me approaching the more manic peak of my Cyclothymia here. But I don't think so. The past two days reminded me that writing poetry is much more than moving words and drafting lines. It is thinking. It is capturing some element of thought. It is resistance to the communal. It is, in the end, an assertion. It is, in the end, why none of us who create can apologize for what we do, why we cannot allow a group to supersede our individuality. For me, the group is a means of social control. For me, the group, no matter how much it helps calm you, is a series of tiny deaths for the poet.
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