An online poetry panel I attended had a distinguished poet wanting to explore transcendental lyric in poetry over her usual methods of writing from the immediate, and cause and agenda based writing. Her poems have been about social issues of the present and she wanted to explore the question of integrating the beyond as we continue to cover the trauma and joy of the present.
Her intended investigation was immediately followed by panelists and audience who wanted to study the:
Shape of her poems
Title of her poems
How she blends reality into her work
Cultural appropriation
Identity work ( Indian womanhood)
I immediately noticed a trend.
An enquiry of a curious artist hijacked by an audience that wants to only see and read the tangible. An enquiry of immortality in art overtaken by the desperation of a crowd that only pursues understanding of what is in front, a known reality, rather than study of ether of unknown worlds that could make the work, the performer and the reader eternal in that one moment of the only study that matters.
Work eternal. Wasn’t that what art was always supposed to be about? An engraving on a rock from an early mind attempting to use their artistic expression to leave behind a creation that defeats the helplessness of the disease and death of a mortal body?
But somehow over time, art and poetry has simply been reduced to ego identity and social crisis, simply a marker of the time it existed in.
I am not saying identify art and activism art is not significant and important. I am saying that is all what is being produced and accepted today. Anything with a slightly more expanded level of coverage of existence, is concluded to be too abstract, difficult to understand, non relevant. An identity less and socially acknowledged theme less work simply doesn’t stand a chance to get noticed.
Funasaka Yoshisuke
Date: 1981
Never before have we witnessed a revolution with so much awareness and education brought about for diversity. But somehow diversity of thought is never a consideration. Only certain topics and styles accessible to readers have the right to be on the shelf. Rest is discarded.
This reductionism of creative expression has brought us to a point where we only have the option to select from shallow pop art or literary arrogance. Anything in between or outside is concluded to be not required.
Pick up any poetry of today’s times and the self, to the point many times narcissistic, clearly comes through. Locate immortality in the work and let me know. Is it independent of time and space it was written in ? Have you read ‘Noise of time’ ? How it makes the language of Armenia eternal, not with the words of the language, but it’s air ? Do you get the significance of such art?
Every poet is reduced to woman of color, black man, brown girl. With the horrifying past of oppression and violation humanity has witnessed, some of these solutions are not just important but necessary. But to reduce art to just this is threatening and ridiculous. Representation is required. But remember it is the representation of all kinds. That includes representation even of the one who is not an ‘ist’.
The Dinner Party by Chicago started the most needed dialogue and revolution in society of how women artists and role models are excluded from historical records. However it was exclusionary to begin with. There were many communities who felt offended because they didn’t have representation on the dinner table . I would ask too why Lal Ded and Mahadevi Verma are not on the table.
That is the danger with identity politics in art, that it is incapable to solve the social crisis in a comprehensive manner without creating more issues of isolation, division and despair, and simply chaos. Again not undermining what The Dinner party achieved. But we must ask ourselves is this our only left choice of expression for problem solving (as evident by current trends). Is there no other expression worthy of surfacing ?
Judy Chicago
Date: 1979
On the other hand the transcendental expression independent of space and time while it uses the quantum of immediate reality, its experienced past, present, and future, as well as the dark matter of all other worlds, is the possible reclamation of the true purpose and use of art . Sure it will contain horrors of the past, terror of the present and restlessness for the future, but it will also carry with it a song that is simply free and eternal.
Morris Graves
Date: 1979
One lost descendant will pick it up irrespective of the color of their skin and gender they identify with , and find their song, one they have been waiting for. I found it in works of many “old white men”, a favorite term of this generation. Sorry if this makes you uncomfortable and angry. But I refuse to participate in this circus of categorizing and reducing humans to one dimensional and generalized narrative, and what it is doing to art and poetry.
I will never pick up a book or go see a work of art based on whether a man or a woman wrote it , whether they were pink or purple. I am fascinated by expressions of absence. I am intrigued by a puzzle that by remaining a puzzle connects all the universes for me. I am interested in that. Everything else is useless for me. Another hollow construction of a worm.
Finding the intangible, the secret of the mystics, the god of science, as we maneuver through the biggest challenges humanity as ever faced, might just be the only answer, right in front of us all this time.
Vaishali Paliwal
