Shackle Up My Expectations : pickled herring is not sexist

The iguana will bite those that do not dream.?

About a year ago I made the bewildered and semi-conscious decision to apply to Concordia?s Creative Writing program. I knew it was competitive. I was facing a huge failure on my part ? I had that permanent bitter savour in my mouth and the cooling fall weather was poisoned by my anger. Fall was my favourite time of the year, but not last year.

In one of my first classes a professor asked her students what they were hoping to learn as writers in the program. What were their expectations of working as a writer? Did they have the discipline?

I remember arrogantly scoffing within the safe confines of my thoughts that I wasn?t going to be a writer. I was still operating on the assumption of the temporary. I was so convinced that my situation wasn?t real, even the mention that I was striving to be a writer seemed ludicrous. Maybe I thought I was better than being an artist. Maybe I thought I was better than being an arts student. I?d been studying math and physics with the intention of becoming a scientist, or an engineer, for the better part of my life. Art was anathema. I would not be a painter, a guitarist, or a writer. Looking back, I sometimes wonder if I left one fantasy for another, a sort of false awakening where I realise I?m still in some sort of dream where the walls and confines of my self can shift quite easily.

I am now an arts student, almost despite myself. I have opinions in class, and have to do away with the idea that there is a right answer.?Since beginning my?camino at Concordia, and permanently turning a page away from the mess of the before, I?ve sometimes felt very alienated by my new path. As arrogant as I may have been, snarking at the thought of becoming an artist, I also ultimately want to connect very much. I want to write every day. I am yearning for that discipline and also for that frenzy that accompanies creation, drafting, editing, correcting, formulating, gluing, collaging, destroying. I want to move beyond ? I know how to order pizza in three languages (French being my maternal language, and Spanish my other language) but I do not feel limitless (weightless, effortless) in any of my tongues.

In one of the more teeth clenching events of my life in the last year, yesterday I had to sit in a class and write a coherent in-class essay for the first time since I left high school.

Yesterday turns out to have been more significant than just that.

I met and more importantly heard a poet called Derek Beaulieu yesterday.

That coincidental for-university-credit attendance to his Concordia Writer?s Read conference was game changing. He read exerts of his works, especially those from his published ?seen of the crime? (a collection of essays on conceptual writing) and described his teaching style. He is a creative writing professor at Calgary University and Mount Royal university. He?s also the dude in charge of NoPress.

These are my notes of thoughts and observations made during the conference. They are synthesized in a manner that more or less makes sense. Hopefully I?ll be able to transfer to you some of the sensations I encountered while listening to Derek Beaulieu speak.

As a teacher of creative writing (remember: creative writing is to literature what playing the violin is to studying music theory, sort of) Derek Beaulieu assigns his students a series of Impossible Assignments. For instance, one of his students apparently wanted to write nothing but stories about orcs.

?An orc, for the uninitiated.?

Derek Beaulieu?s response to his student is: Why not. Go for it. Good luck to you. Write the most interesting story about orcs you can muster. But do it using nothing but punctuation marks.

This is what preoccupies Derek Beaulieu. Conceptual writing* prefers not to engage with the traditional expectations given to literature and writing. Why use words when it is so much more difficult to use periods and commas and parentheses to express yourself? Have you ever imagined telling a story set in the Spaghetti Wild West using nothing but the passive voice? Have you ever tried describing what it?s like to read in a dream? In dreams books are merely the shelves of their bookness, blurred beyond the thresholds of readability. ?Conceptual writing pushes and pushes as we grope in a sea of abstraction for the boundaries of what on earth writing is.

Clearly, we are going nowhere. We are not creating but selecting. There is no originality, we already have at our fingertips (in our blurry, blurry dreams) the perfect library. Does this crush us or liberate us? The gall to call ourselves writers and especially poets! Are you a writer when you are not writing at all? Can?not writing?be seen as a literary act? In a most Aesthetic observation, is the writer?s life part of the oeuvre???Collage: the only thing at stake is obsolescence. If you don?t share,?if you don?t steal, you stagnate. We scorn poets for sharing. Being bullied in high school is not just cause for publication ? don?t ring a bell, wring a neck ? poetry has more to learn from archeology and engineering and medicine and every other subject in existence than it does to learn from poetry. Poets don?t know anything, that?s why they are poets. Distilled, I wonder if this is a nod to that inner curiosity that drives the mind. Our eyesight exists to be overcome. Matter is here to test us?. What does poetry do? What is the post modernist offering of poetry?

Watching Derek Beaulieu perform and read and laugh (he is a fairly charming persona at the podium, warm and entertaining) gave me the distinct impression that

Academia: nonsense.

If poetry has to learn from graphic design and advertisements, do we not run the risk of creating traffic signs all over again? If writing is indeed constructed one letter at a time than perhaps it makes sense (maybe it really doesn?t) to say that poetry is the business slogan for impossible and imaginary business models.

And here we touch a subject that hit me upside the head yesterday. This is why I even decided to write today. ?Poets chose to be poets because they do not have the drive to be anything else.? muses Derek Beaulieu, and of the poet?s subject matter ?The natural is obvious and to be obvious is to be inartistic.? He goes on to speak of collage, which I touched on above, and he went further.?In an almost decadent way, Derek Beaulieu offers us these juicy bits. Poetry should be disastrous and criminal and perverse. Poetry should be an affront to poetry. Writing doesn?t always know that it is writing and poetry should be the same. The focus should not be ?what does poetry do? but ?is that even poetry?? ? that is the questions that pushes our understanding, and in understanding there is living. Get in the way of your own poetry. How do you move away from your own clich?s and pry apart the elements that form associations and categorizations in your mind? (There are fascinating bits of cognitive psychology I would love to throw in here, but I would need the Violinist to help but they are currently working on a presentation and I don?t want to derail them. Another day.)

Build something that is yours.

This is the part that I really love, the part of the talk that embraces my ?Fuck This Shit? mentality tattooed under my skin. One should not be a poet creator of poetry: one should be a creator of their own poetry: one should be their own poet. A poet has no audience. Canada has a population of?34,482,779 (folks, that?s less than the state of California). If your average successful poetry collection has a print run of 500 volumes, then statistically the readership of a poet is 0%. There is no practical statistical relevance to the poet or the poem, even inside circles of Academia. I consider my previous torn anxiety at the mention of my desire to become a writer. There is no such thing, practically, as a poet. Derek Beaulieu facetiously apologized to a friend of mine in the room during Q&A, asking him if he had any hobbies he could turn to instead of studying poetry. We must be crazy, here, to embrace creative writing and to embrace abstraction and conceptualism and the intangible. Statistically, we have no place outside our own brains. A writer is in the eye of the beholder. We live in a society that has a place for a JK Rowling and a Stephen King but not the myriad of students who graduate from ?Creative Writing programs across North America. We are similar to the classical musicians finding their funding and opportunities shrinking, or to the fine artists ?having to turn to graphic design or interior decorating to make a living.

So there is no place for the poet.?Embrace that zero. Dance like you are all alone. Don?t be a poet, be your poetry. There is no censorship. There is no limit but your own mind.?Within our lack of a box or scaffold is the possibility for pure, total invention.

Be that one hand clapping.

Thank you Derek Beaulieu.

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Footnotes:

1 -?http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15869?Federico Garc?a Lorca?s?City That Does Not Sleep

* ? Whatever on earth that is.

2 ? As a side note, Derek Beaulieu says the word ?oeuvre? funny. But as I?d never heard that word used before in English, I won?t judge it too hard. But every time he said the word I wanted to laugh. The world ?oeuvre? running out of his mouth sounded skinny and flacid and dandy, like a little gay twink rolling out of a disco club.

3 -?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waking_Life?Waking Life?by?Richard Linklater

Source: http://gersande.com/wordpress/shackle-up-my-expectations/

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