Where have all the fucking poets gone?
I hope they're dead.
A few years ago, I came up with the brilliant idea to write every digit from one to one million. I thought it would be an interesting meditation and an exercise in wrestling with the actuality of a truly large number.* I planned to begin and end each number-writing session with a few paragraphs of writing, exploring any ideas that came from the experience.
I don’t recall exactly how far along I got. I made an early tactical error by computing how many digits would be involved. Writing every number from one to one million requires 5,888,896 digits, which really just sounds as abstract as one million. So, I converted that to time. Imagining that I could consistently write one digit per second, it would require over 1600 hours to complete the task, and even estimating the rate higher would only cut the time to 800 hours at 2 digits/second or 550 at 3 digits/second.
This knowledge was enough to dishearten me. It didn’t help when I began to consider how long between true milestones. At my highest estimated rate of 3 digits/sec, I would reach 100,000 after 45 hours of work, but would have to work twelve times again that long to make a million.
Regardless, the Sisyphean and essentially empty endeavor went uncompleted. I hadn’t even given it much thought in the intervening years. That is, until I was thinking about my repeatedly-stalled novel (which is also my thesis project, and my last major hurdle to graduation), particularly about the narrator and the distaste for idealism I share with him, and I wondered why I never write poetry anymore.
For years, poetry was all I really wanted to write. After drunkenly announcing to a group of friends from back East that had all ended up here together that I wanted to be a poet, that was my central, sustaining artistic goal for years. I’d try stories here and there, and wrote some sketch comedy (during which time I met TBO), but poetry was my love. I wrote it, read it, performed it.
I didn’t suck. Some of my work didn’t translate well to the page, and I’ve only ever had a few published, but even the harshest critics from my circle at the time had to admit that when I read my own work, it made for damn good art.
But, at some ill-defined point along the way, I stopped. I found I was relying more and more on poring through old notes to get something together for a show. The last bit I wrote specifically to be performed was a one-man poetry slam with layered costumes so I stripped my way from caricature to caricature of slam poets. Then there was just some noodling, and then really nothing. The last serious poem I wrote was for Liv’s first birthday, the second-to-last was for my friend Julianto’s memorial, each over two years ago.
There doesn’t seem to be a simple answer for why. I’m excessively cynical, but I always have been. I definitely grew to hate the poetry scene, especially the slams, and had the hatred reinforced all over again in grad school. I mean, fucking poets. Get a fucking life.
That right there typifies the change, though. That night, just before Christmas, a lot of years ago, exchanging cheap gifts with friends and getting hammered on a Jagermeister knock-off, when I announced I wanted to be a poet, it wasn’t a grand proclamation. I looked at my feet, gave the word half-voice, was almost asking permission. It felt so fucking romantic and right. I want to be a poet.
Now the word catches in my throat.
I even still like poetry, good poetry. Wislawa Szymborska. Carl Sandberg. Tennyson. Blake. Bukowski. Sometimes Ginsberg but fuck that Ferlingetti hack.
It is just such a mad enterprise, and one so lightly taken up by fools (and not the good kind of fools, the dumbass ones). It only works with dead solemn determination and in absentia of the artists themselves, who are insufferable. There is such a thing as a humble novelist, but there is no such thing as a humble poet.
For me, poetry came to occupy the same space the writing-to-a-million project. I only cared to engage it on the meta-level, thinking about doing it without actually doing it. Like poetry. I have poetic thoughts, I write poetic notes, I imagine single lines delivered, but I’m unwilling to engage its actuality. I would write to a million if it didn’t take so long, and I’d write poetry if I didn’t have to be a fucking poet to do it.
Were I still idealistic, or at list willing to choke down my gorge when confronted with idealism, then the actuality would be the thing, would be worth anything. But, it just isn’t anymore.
Maybe I am losing faith in art.
Though I appreciate more, I think, the irreproducible beauty of everyday life.
A cynical romantic? Yeah, that’s healthy. Morose and angry is no way to go through life, son.**
* - It was also inspired, I have to admit, by a friend who suggested, when I asked if he wanted to play rummy, that we play to a million. We made it up over the 50,000 mark, with multiple pages and pieces of moulding and walls and empty tape rolls as scorecards. We gave up shortly after I figured that with 380 available points/hand, even if one player scored every possible point every hand, which is of course not possible given the rules of the game, it would require over 2600 hands to complete the game. I just don’t think we liked each other quite well enough for that kind of commitment.
** - Bonus points if you can identify the classic movie this last line has been paraphrased from.
I don’t recall exactly how far along I got. I made an early tactical error by computing how many digits would be involved. Writing every number from one to one million requires 5,888,896 digits, which really just sounds as abstract as one million. So, I converted that to time. Imagining that I could consistently write one digit per second, it would require over 1600 hours to complete the task, and even estimating the rate higher would only cut the time to 800 hours at 2 digits/second or 550 at 3 digits/second.
This knowledge was enough to dishearten me. It didn’t help when I began to consider how long between true milestones. At my highest estimated rate of 3 digits/sec, I would reach 100,000 after 45 hours of work, but would have to work twelve times again that long to make a million.
Regardless, the Sisyphean and essentially empty endeavor went uncompleted. I hadn’t even given it much thought in the intervening years. That is, until I was thinking about my repeatedly-stalled novel (which is also my thesis project, and my last major hurdle to graduation), particularly about the narrator and the distaste for idealism I share with him, and I wondered why I never write poetry anymore.
For years, poetry was all I really wanted to write. After drunkenly announcing to a group of friends from back East that had all ended up here together that I wanted to be a poet, that was my central, sustaining artistic goal for years. I’d try stories here and there, and wrote some sketch comedy (during which time I met TBO), but poetry was my love. I wrote it, read it, performed it.
I didn’t suck. Some of my work didn’t translate well to the page, and I’ve only ever had a few published, but even the harshest critics from my circle at the time had to admit that when I read my own work, it made for damn good art.
But, at some ill-defined point along the way, I stopped. I found I was relying more and more on poring through old notes to get something together for a show. The last bit I wrote specifically to be performed was a one-man poetry slam with layered costumes so I stripped my way from caricature to caricature of slam poets. Then there was just some noodling, and then really nothing. The last serious poem I wrote was for Liv’s first birthday, the second-to-last was for my friend Julianto’s memorial, each over two years ago.
There doesn’t seem to be a simple answer for why. I’m excessively cynical, but I always have been. I definitely grew to hate the poetry scene, especially the slams, and had the hatred reinforced all over again in grad school. I mean, fucking poets. Get a fucking life.
That right there typifies the change, though. That night, just before Christmas, a lot of years ago, exchanging cheap gifts with friends and getting hammered on a Jagermeister knock-off, when I announced I wanted to be a poet, it wasn’t a grand proclamation. I looked at my feet, gave the word half-voice, was almost asking permission. It felt so fucking romantic and right. I want to be a poet.
Now the word catches in my throat.
I even still like poetry, good poetry. Wislawa Szymborska. Carl Sandberg. Tennyson. Blake. Bukowski. Sometimes Ginsberg but fuck that Ferlingetti hack.
It is just such a mad enterprise, and one so lightly taken up by fools (and not the good kind of fools, the dumbass ones). It only works with dead solemn determination and in absentia of the artists themselves, who are insufferable. There is such a thing as a humble novelist, but there is no such thing as a humble poet.
For me, poetry came to occupy the same space the writing-to-a-million project. I only cared to engage it on the meta-level, thinking about doing it without actually doing it. Like poetry. I have poetic thoughts, I write poetic notes, I imagine single lines delivered, but I’m unwilling to engage its actuality. I would write to a million if it didn’t take so long, and I’d write poetry if I didn’t have to be a fucking poet to do it.
Were I still idealistic, or at list willing to choke down my gorge when confronted with idealism, then the actuality would be the thing, would be worth anything. But, it just isn’t anymore.
Maybe I am losing faith in art.
Though I appreciate more, I think, the irreproducible beauty of everyday life.
A cynical romantic? Yeah, that’s healthy. Morose and angry is no way to go through life, son.**
* - It was also inspired, I have to admit, by a friend who suggested, when I asked if he wanted to play rummy, that we play to a million. We made it up over the 50,000 mark, with multiple pages and pieces of moulding and walls and empty tape rolls as scorecards. We gave up shortly after I figured that with 380 available points/hand, even if one player scored every possible point every hand, which is of course not possible given the rules of the game, it would require over 2600 hands to complete the game. I just don’t think we liked each other quite well enough for that kind of commitment.
** - Bonus points if you can identify the classic movie this last line has been paraphrased from.
posted by JJisafool at 1:04 PM
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