At the last English Honor Society open poetry reading for the school year, a sophomore attended who had a gift for reciting. I arrived late and missed most of his first performance, but on the second round robin, he recited T. S. Eliot's poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. It was amazing. It was like time stopped. At the end everyone in the circle was holding their breath.
I had really forgotten how beautiful the piece was. I didn't catch all the allusions (never have), and even after analyzing the poem to death in three separate classes during my school career, I'm still not completely sure what it means. But the language is sparkling and voluptuous. It's big and juicy and sings in your ears. My mind might not get it all, but my heart certainly does. I think: So this is what they mean by poetry...
Eliot was only in his late twenties when he wrote that poem, not too much older than most of the people in attendance, and quite a bit younger than some. I wondered if anyone could get away with writing something like Prufrock today. I mean: it's a good poem and the words still breathe after over 80 years. Why not write something that ambitious? Why not try to write to the stars?
Well...it's definitely too long for a slam competition. The poem takes at least a good seven minutes to recite well and the upper limit to strut your stuff in most slams is three minutes. And even though the piece is captivating, it's not exactly an instant crowd pleaser. There aren't many hooks (unless, of course, you count the refrain, In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo) nothing to force a crowd of rowdy people to shut up and take notice.
Yet: it's way too long for the average rarified poetry journal, most of which won't consider a poem over 40 lines. (Ask my poor apartment mate who's "line-squishing" some poems for a contest and groaning about it this very minute). Most of these periodicals don't come out very often and the idea is to print one poem per page so that the maximum number of poems can be published. 105 lines simply hog too much space.
And then there are all the other charges that can be levied against it. It's too much damn work to read. I swear, Fr. Rose, I read this six times last night and I still don't get it! Are you sure we have to write a paper on this? You can't skim it and you definitely can't read it and watch TV (my preferred method of study in high school). And it's pretentious as hell. You actually have to consult other books to understand it. What's this? An epigraph in fricking Italian? Just who does this Eliot dude think he is? I don't have time for this crap! There is just no way to truly appreciate Prufrock passively; if you want to get something out of it, the piece demands something of you.
I have a funny feeling that if Eliot had penned (or word-processed) Prufrock in the 90's, it might have eventually ended up stashed in a desk drawer. Maybe some fellow grad students would groove on it for its snob appeal, but mostly it would be a great poem without an audience. Maybe Eliot in the 1990's would decide to write software instead. There is no joy in thankless labor.
Plenty of people think that art (and by the word art, I mean to include all the arts: literature, visuals, music, etc.) should be easy. Appreciating a painting shouldn't be like scaling Everest; a sentence shouldn't be a triathlon unto itself. Art really shouldn't demand more than two hours of your time at a stretch. It should dovetail nicely into a busy lifestyle -- y'know, like eat, sleep, work, sex, children, art -- and it shouldn't keep you up at night thinking about it.
I can understand that. There really isn't much time. Back when I was going to school full-time and working at least 35 hours a week, I can't say I was always up to an artful challenge. In the few free hours I had, I read short books that I finished and forgot in a day, and listened to music that went in one ear and out the other.
I also don't have much patience for the willfully and stupidly obscure. If I'm going to spend an hour or more listening to your symphony, it better not hurt my ears for no reason. If I take the time to stumble through your page-long sentence, it had better say more than the sky is blue. Unfortunately, there's a lot of that kind of crap out there, and after a while it gets difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. So often I shy away from things that look too complicated; you never know when it's going to be masturbation or the real thing.
But then there are those days when I'm jonesing for some art to change my life -- searching for something to catapult me into the realm of the magical. Often when I'm in one of these strange moods, I find what I'm looking for almost immediately (I mentioned in an earlier issue my psychic CD tours) but there still are enough of those lean times when I have the yen for weeks and nothing seems to fit the bill.
Sometimes I think artists are afraid to really challenge their audiences. I'm not talking about merely offending, insulting, or shocking them (that's relatively easy -- bare some naughty bits, shout a few curse words, or mention Satan --that'll get 80% of the people at least one time) but creating a space where people can truly expand their minds.
I can think of several reasons for this. For one thing: deep work takes time and if you are one of those trying to make a living doing art it pays to be prolific. (Even if you aren't making a living at it, it takes an enormous amount of dedication to stick with something that may take years to complete.) Art beyond the ordinary can also take forever to find an audience -- and that can be discouraging to say the least. And producing the stuff takes a measure of self-confidence and skill that many artists lack. There is plenty of room for doubt and stumbles along the way. Who am I to write an 8-hour long play in the age of half-hour sitcoms (actually 23 minutes without commercials)? Who am I to dream of odd noises and call it music? Who am I to choose words that will have people scurrying to their dictionaries? And of course: when you think big, you can fail big -- and that may be the scariest part of all.
Still: when the shit works, it works wonders.
Several years ago I went to see the Pulitzer prize winning play, The Kentucky Cycle, during its pitifully short run on Broadway. (I think it lasted only 38 shows.) I didn't exactly go willingly. A friend begged me to go and though I finally acquiesced, I can't say I was overly thrilled at the prospect of sitting through a play that was over 8 hours long even if there was a dinner break in there somewhere. Plus the piece was supposed to be deadly serious, all about the blood, guts, and corruption that birthed this great nation of ours, the real story, devil's horns and all. And here I am a child of the TV age: I fidget if things last over two hours and there aren't any funny bits.
The play uses a limited amount of actors, very little in the way of scenery, and no fancy stage effects. In other words: there are no bells and whistles to grab and keep your attention. And yet: within 20 minutes I was transfixed and enthralled. When dinnertime rolled around I was actually surprised as well as a bit disappointed. I wanted more.
When I got home later that night -- actually the wee hours of the next morning -- I had trouble getting to sleep. I kept thinking about the play. For the next few days it was all I could talk about. Even now, years later, I keep hoping some nearby regional theater company will produce it so I can see it again.
I suppose on some level it is somewhat presumptuous to write an 8-hour play. I mean: I lost a whole day. The actors had to memorize a book of lines each. The thing was hellaciously expensive to produce. And yet in my humble opinion it was all worth it -- cuz it truly was magic. It did what art is supposed to do.
But back to the sophomore who recited T.S. Eliot... The same young man (boy does that make me sound way older than I am) also read an original sestina, an obscure 16th century poetic form that only English majors (yes I'm guilty) and their professors know about and dare to attempt.
Basically in a sestina you have six stanzas of six lines each. Each of the six lines ends with a particular word and these same six words play musical chairs throughout the poem. When the form works, it is a beautiful demonstration of the subtleties of language as the same six words change in tone and meaning depending on their placement within the stanzas.
The sophomore's poem was not entirely successful; there were several places where the form obscured the message, which is usually what happens when budding writers first try to write in form. They get lost in the rules and forget that the purpose of those rules is to get their words to take flight. But at a time when poetry tends to mean write what you feel and who gives a flying squirrel about beauty or discipline, it was nice to hear someone attempt to do something more.
Now: was the poem pretentious? Some people might have thought so. Was it intellectual? Well, yeah, but what's wrong with that? Was the poem "easy"? No, not particularly (I asked to read the hard copy after the reading disbanded because I didn't quite catch it all) but it wasn't overly difficult either.
My point is that many artists and would-be artists don't aim high enough in their work. They play it way too safe. They assume that art isn't worth working for, that everything should be as undemanding and bland as, say, most top 40 music.
But the average person is much more flexible than you think. If an artist creates something truly transcendent, people will follow even if the path isn't the smoothest. Maybe not all the people -- or even a majority -- but enough. There will always be those who make time for magic. Create something for us.