07-30-2014 Barthes states in The Death of the Author while writing of Balzacs, Sarrasine, Writing is the neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing. It took me years to realize this on my own although I fain to put it so in my mind as a kind of death. As a seasoned poet I find still that people take each of my poem as if they are from the heart of me as if I am giving them the gossip of me, as if every I in my poems are this I that I call me when in fact I am very much a poet who believe that the poet is in the service of the people, therefore I write from my conceived perception of others who can not or simply do not write poetry for themselves or others. This attitude is an old tenet of my philosophy of the poetic art. As a young writer of 20, 41 years ago now I deceived to write a poem from the perspective of everyone that I met, little did I realized the emotional cost of such a commitment and needless to say it was one that I could not live up to, such a commitment at that young age. But having attempted to do so in some limited form or the other these many ensuing years I find that in writing it is all to easy to set the self aside, in the case of poetry and that this setting aside or loosing the self to the creation of the poem is kind of sending the conscious I on a time out and letting the unconsciousness guide the development of the poem being created in the moment, this ability is a benefits to new and seasoned poets alike, but it is not a death. I do not fully agree metaphorically specking or not with the ideal that the entire self of the writer is lost as not to be recognized if you know the writer well enough. The ideal that the poets is in some way confining in you as reader and her/his most deeply held thoughts and/or beliefs seems to be the ruling perception of the readers, or that the poet have some pipe-line of insight into the big ticket ideals like love, beauty God and the like is surly a fatality perpetrated by Poets of old and their critics. It even went so far (this involvement of the I) as the invention of the New Criticism movement with its objective correlative” of Eliot who believed that poetry must be impersona (while I like Eliot and Shelley with a nod to Milton in small doses old T. S. and I did not feel the same) The Confessional Poets had a hand in encouraging the point of view that the poet matters more these we realize (Which raise the question, is each poem a confession of some sort even if it is not the confession of the body that wrote it) I am a firm believer in the thought that something of the creator is in the creation; as something of man is in God. However I have challenged myself in that sometime when I run across a poem that do not remember having written till within a few lines of reading the poem I recognize it as of my hand, so to speak, meaning I know not if it is some internal I that is hidden in the poem or some latent misted recognition of having written the poem at some point in my life. This is some of the few times that I get to read one of my poem as the reader encountering the poem for the first time. On this matter, we poets seldom if ever for most of us gets to read our poems as the reader does in that as writer of the poem the very act of creating precludes us from having that experience with our own work but not with the work of other poets. I am going to digress here as the art of digression is the processes of my thinking and therefore my writing as I find more comfort in writing as I think. A case in point where I have experienced a closeness to reading some of my work as a first time reader is with part of my prose poem “The Jazz Symphonic Glass Ear”, which toped off at the lofty length of 391 pages. Because the piece was written in a short period of time; less then a year parts of the piece seem to have not imprinted itself on my brain (of course I do not believe that the act of creating is capable of non-imprintation, I simply just do not recall having writing those sections of the poem.) “The Jazz Symphonic Glass Ear” in a rough form was published as an ebook and can be read at the following link (scribd/doc/36752257/David-E-Patton-The-Jazz-Symphonic-Glass-Ear) It would be a misstate to take the I of this or that given poem to be the I of the I of that poem but I hasten to add that for many poets in the early stages of being such this is indeed true and advisable to do. Bathes describe this death of the author as to substitute language itself for the Person.... meaning the author. This concept which states that the works of an author is to be interpretative without consideration of all biographical facts and belief of that author as it relates to the interpretation of the work. This line of thought gives coun blanc to the authors own interpretation of her/his own work as being primarily above the interpretations of the critic/reader. On the face of it this seems to be an ideal understanding of the created processes to give the final say to the Creator, however I am not convince as man who invented his Gods take no responsibility for the working of those Gods but man profess that Gods are all knowing though release himself of the workings of God. As I have stated above I believe the poet to be in the service of the people, and likewise man is in the service of his God but no man is wholly responsible for the interpretation of said Gods but each woman/man is partly responsible for the interpretation of their God and not simply to holy man or priest therefore I expect the reader to bring her/himself to the understanding of the poem or piece of artwork (painting/drawing). I have heard artiest (painters) exclaim when asked by a viewer, “ What do it mean” and the snobbish artiest answer “If you dont know I cant tell you” or something along that line (as if to say, you are to stupid or lack sericacation to understand.) Holding the reader in part responsible for the interpretation of the poem makes the poem a work of shared responsibility as far as interpretation goes. How else, I asked myself could I justify the poet in the service of the people, and writing from as many perspective as people I know unless there was holes in the poem for the reader to bring themselves to plug their life experiences into the poem thereby completing to poem as a work of art with their personal interpretation of what the poem means. In fact to give life to the poem as relate to this or that reader? This means of course that each poem to some extent have as many interpretations as there are readers, which I presume most poets will find distasteful on its surface. None of my friend who are poets that I have expressed this base tenet to agrees with me. I can with good reasons be accursed of attempting to restore the responsibility of the reader and knocking the author down a few runs of the latter by insisting that the poet works in an art of servitude to the people/reader. I can not understand why poetic need be simply an art of self expression by, of and for the poet along as some kind of selfish therapeutic cleansing of the self for the self along. If indeed this is the was the reason for the need of poetry then the teaching of the art of writing poetry should be a multi years program within the elementary school system and beyond, as reading, writing, arithmetic and alliteration to benefit the population of each cultures giving them the means of self therapy. Without this servitude of the poet then I see little reason why I have devolved my life to the art of poetics. While Valéry who suffered from the disease of the “psychology of the Ego” as Barthes puts it in “Image Music Text” was ill equipped to understand what Mallarmé and Proust were attempting to accomplish. farther more as I am known to have a Surrealistic bent of the post post modernism favor where I do not attempt to give to language a supremacy above its station as a tool of communication while retaining to some degree a lesser reliance on the code of the customary Surrealistic jolt. My seemingly automatic writing preference is a rouge, for while I admit whole heartily and with great thanks I am proud to profess that in some of my best work my consciousness have gone on break and allows my unconsciousness to write the poem with the Ego/I/consciousness checking in from time to time to assure some kind of uniformity of and discernible logic in the poem at hand, especially as i feel that the poem is approaching its end. As it regards Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoches “First thought best though” followed by Kerouac and preached by my teacher Allen Ginsburg at Naropa Institute, now Naropa University, I disagree with it as an over all ruling tenet of the art of writing poetry. First thought best thought seems to me to offer the belief that you as poet have researched the subject fully and abandon the created process to that research or that you fully trust your unconsciousness to write the thing whole drawing in part on the research remembered. For myself a combination of first thought best thought and editing my works for my personal expression of the poetic art. To put it simply, in contrary to the wordiness of my wants, style and thinking process, the author as it regards the poet is not dead but in a debt of servitude to the reader and both are responsible for the interpretation of any given poem. In fact the poem as a work of art is incomplete without the accepted legality of the readers interpretation.
Posted on: Thu, 31 Jul 2014 13:07:53 +0000
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