Many years ago, when I was in college, I took a poetry class with Clayton Eshleman. He was a high-brow poetry connoisseur, as well as translator & editor of some of the most amazing poets of the 20th Century - including Pablo Neruda, Antonin Artaud, Octavio Paz and Cesar Vallejo. Needless to say, he did not take kindly to trite poetry. He was not gentle in poetry class. No, he was brutal. He would rip everything to shreds, call it like it is, he would publicly declare it trite, humiliate the students and he set the bar for poetry writing exceedingly high. He wanted every one of us to write poetry about more than roses and sorrow; he demanded genius & creativity, deft word play. He inspired some of the most obscure, dense, trippy poetry Ive ever written in my life.. I owe him a debt of gratitude because Ive never been able to look at trite creativity and coddle it and be afraid of telling people what I really feel. He wanted better. He wanted refinement. He pushed us to expand our own envelope and be gutsier, less confined to a narrow mind. He wanted deep emotion, nothing superficial. I realize that as an artist, it is far too easy to become emotionally attached to the things that you create and take it personally when someone gives you less than positive feedback. But the one thing I learned from Clayton is that you need to have someone there to look at it from objective eyes, and obliterate your emotional attachment to it and call it garbage and force you to reconsider everything. It makes you a better artist. Its about refinement, deeper listening. Creating something not for the approval or disapproval, not for the attention, but to cut deeper into the bone - something more rooted in essence... Something that feels both more clean and unobstructed in self-flatulence, and powerful in its authenticity.
Posted on: Sat, 08 Mar 2014 04:16:04 +0000
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