Splash No. 255 - Poetic Failure
Poetic Failure
I started reading a book by poet and essayist Ben Lerner called The Hatred of Poetry, which explores the nature of the much-maligned genre and what makes it so deeply disliked by seemingly everyone. As expected of any book about poetry, it’s abstruse and strange and deeply interesting all the while. I’m enjoying reading it to re-examine my own relationship with poetry and art in general.
I love Lerner’s framing of the source of poetry: “Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical—the human world of violence and difference—and to reach the transcendent or divine.”
How could we ever reach for anything else in art but some sort of transcendent beauty? Even when creating things that are trite or mundane or boring or simple, our act of creation attempts to transcend individual experience, inviting recipients to transcend their own lives and enter an experience created by us. In our most triumphant works of art, we can accomplish a version of this, but never one that allow one to escape the world entirely.
As a result of this untraversable gulf between our reaching towards the divine and the actual works of art that we create, Lerner frames the poet as a “tragic figure” and the poem as “a record of failure.” This is a comforting way to think about art for me. There’s a little less pressure to creating art when everything in your medium is a type of failure in the first place. Writing a poem is thus an impossible task, one where we can write and iterate for a million years, but we’ll never be able to transcend the world with the work alone.
Maybe, in this act of creating art, we can be like Albert Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus, in which Camus draws parallels between the absurdist life of the modern man to the tragic hero of Sisyphus who was forced to roll a boulder up a hill for all eternity, only for it to roll back down once he reached the top, and for him to start all over again. Camus suggests that Sisyphus isn’t all that tragic, since he must eventually reach a state of contented acceptance after realizing the futility and certainty of his fate. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” he writes.
In the same vein, maybe the artist must surrender to the impossibility of escaping the world through their art or poetry. At one point, I think I envisioned myself writing something impactful and world-shattering that could really do something to the world. Even then, no amount of art will ever remove suffering from the world, stop people from aging, keep sickness at bay. Instead, I can attend to the toil of writing, knowing fully well that it won’t change anything that matters like that. I can write freely and comfortably, letting the struggle of bringing words to a page fill my heart.
Drops of the Week
PLAYLIST - Italian Vintage Summer - 🤌🏽🤌🏽🤌🏽
ARTICLE - "Summer Reading Assignment" by Austin Kleon - Having Fun Isn't Hard When You Have a Library Card !
POEM - "In all of my dreams, the world i love you" by Hanif Abdurraqib - "I think dying / afraid is treason against your lone, cherished life. a disaster of terrible hours/ masked by occasional miracle. but I am speaking for myself, I say."
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With lots of small boulders,
Nikhil