How about not writing anything?
Flicking through various poetry books to find ideas for writing makes for eerily familiar reading. Books such as Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, and the Teach Yourself: Poetry book all suggest writing more as a way of dealing with the fact that you haven’t written anything. Very like the commentators who suggest that we should spend more money because, in spending too much, the economy has collapsed, but depends on spending to be revived again. I was reading this article, and thought, what about another solution? Isn’t the drive to be creative too limited to the idea of production?
In my own work, there is often very little that is worthy in the pieces I write for the sake of getting through my block. Plus, who’s to say my frantic morning pages are effective? Sometimes, when I haven’t written anything for a while, I’ll sit down and bang out three or four new poems that I then perform ad nauseum for the next six years…
Why treat performances like auxiliary aspects of poems? I think a performance is less wasteful than writing a poem, just as using a mooncup is less wasteful than using a tampon. It would probably be better for everybody if I started using old work as a catalyst for something new. In other words, taking the things I’ve written and published and giving them new life by riffing off them on stage. A totally improvised piece with chunks of old poems for support would be a) fresh each time, b) a calibration for skill (just as freestyle is among rappers / emcees), and c) creativity without wasteful production!
I know it’s nothing new. But I’ve been reading a lot about conceptual art, particularly in relation to the current “death” of the novel. Specifically, how ideas about copying others, having non-physical artworks and fucking with the audience was a new lease of life. What’s hilarious about the announcements pertaining to the “death” of the novel, is how much it shows that death is socially constructed. In an introduction to Anthropology, I read that, for westerners, death is the point at which there is no detection of electrical activity in the cortex; in Polynesian cultures death is not a particular incident, but relates to a process that begins when the individual withdraws from society and refuses the food and water that support life; in Austronesian cultures – Borneo, Sulawesi and Madagascar – a person isn’t dead until the flesh has rotted from the bones. For some, literature is dead when the stuff doesn’t sell; according to Lee Seigel death is confirmed when someone like James Wood emerges as top critic; back in 2001 Andrew Marr said death took place when the novel simply wasn’t exciting; For others, it’s when Time Magazine can’t recommend anything decent to the average reader.
And we don’t need to point out that poetry is already dead and buried and, like, doesn’t exist anymore.
I’m not going to argue that conceptual-art-as-we-know-it-meets-literature is necessarily the new way forward, since I dislike the clucking for first-dom among people trying to make their name with an idea so ‘out there’ as to be unrepeatable. But I think the idea that we might need literary techniques that curb productivity rather than increase it is a funny one. Not only because it flies in the face of every book and every writing workshop on earth, but, let’s say we did all stop writing novels/poems and did something else. Preferably something that the average desk-bound critic couldn’t keep up with, such as an oral culture of nightly, improvised performances that used slang and references of rapid obsolescence. That disallowed video cameras. Wouldn’t it send critics / academics into the kind of existential crisis we’re seeing among the apoplectic money-lenders in the face of digital publishing, file sharing and copyright indifference? Wouldn’t they deserve it? And wouldn’t it be fun?
