One month later…
Oh jeez, it’s been awhile. Things have gotten quite the bit hectic in the world of literary success. I kid. In all honesty, though, you know you’ve made it as a poet when your poems (“Davis” and “Green Slippers”) are not only the answers to a college level human sexuality course exam question, but part of the question requires a critique. How cool is that!?
Otherwise, the only excitement on the literary front is the weeks leading up to the New Writing Partnership’s Poetry Link Tour for which I’m opening for Martin Newell on April 20th at the Norwich Arts Centre and April 23rd at the Colchester Arts Centre. Should be wicked!
Though this post is short and sweet (and somewhat incompetent at capturing attention, let’s be honest), I shall leave you with this last thought because it’s all I’ve been doing the past two weeks- the ideas on the difference between art and craft (thank you, RG Collingwood)…
Craft and Art differ (for Collingwood) on this somewhat inane idea of ‘expression’. He thinks that art contains expression, and craft, well, doesn’t. He lists six reasons for this, the most interesting being that there is a distinction between planning and execution. This basically means in craft, you know what you’re going to end up with, and with art, you don’t. Which gets me thinking about poetry, right? Yes, most of the time, I sit to write based on a brilliant line that pops into my head. Sometimes a good poem comes out of it, sometimes I realize the line actually isn’t that good. And sometimes, I realize that if I just stick the line into a Sonnet form it becomes exactly what I want it to be. So my question is, Mr. Collingwood, how does the concept of form within art (sculpture, sonnet, canvas size) prevent it from being craft? The idea of expression seems wasted on this distinction between it is too internal to the artist. For something to be considered art, there needs to be a transference of information on some level, be that between artist and audience (like a poem or aria), work of art and audience (like a light installation or a painting), etc. My decision to create a sonnet will turn my line into a sonnet at the end. I know what I will end up with (albeit, I do see his point on I won’t know exactly what words are going to end up in it until it’s finished), but so does a carpenter making a table. In the same way I may not know exactly what words will end up in the sonnet, I do know it will be a sonnet (14 lines, iambic pentameter, etc) in the same way the carpenter knows the table to be four foot by six foot and three and a half feet tall… but he still won’t know until it’s completed where all the knots in the wood are going to be or how the grains of the wood will line up, etc. Is this not the same word problem a poet has on a much-less-stressful scale?
All I know is that Collingwood’s six distinctions are too easily knocked down by obvious art forms (painting, ex.) because he relies too heavily on free-verse (poetry and music) and how it requires internalization. My internalization is not available in sonnet form any more distinctly from those bookshelves I just put together this morning.
-Sx
