Sixto Rodriguez is older than David Bowie. Despite his talent, his life had a very different path. Fame is a fickle and capricious thing, and watching Searching For Sugarman, the documentary about Rodriguez’s life and career, made me question, yet again, the way capitalist economies make space for the arts. Even though I’m a poet, and have never operated under the illusion that I could achieve what nineteenth-century-Americans called “competency” just by writing poems, the way our culture treats its artists is something of deep concern for me, partly because I am still an artist, but also because my father is a musician and has been trying to maintain a competency by means of his music for the past ten years. He too, is incredibly talented. He too was never kissed by the fickle lips of fame, partly because, like Rodriguez, and like me, his chosen art forms (in my dad’s case: traditional Irish and Scottish music and Old Time music; in mine: poetry), are not those that generate a lot of attention by market forces, since almost all of that music is in the public domain.
The celebrity-based system we have now for artists (and athletes, and writers) has two pretty devastating effects; firstly, it means artists live in fear that if they’re not as fortunate as David Bowie, they’ll end up poor as Rodriguez. Some artists, like the controversial (to some) Amanda Palmer are trying to do things in new ways. Of course, some of the tiny, tiny percentage of people who have been fortunate enough to benefit from the celebrity-based system find this threatening. They’ve invested a lot in the older systems that have been in place for about a century that used to guarantee artists could maintain competency; the idea that artists are a professional class is part of that, for sure, and there is still a lot of merit to treating artists as professionals, except that, increasingly, being a professional means less and less in terms of economic security when employers are allowed to do things like deny prospective hires jobs based on bad credit reports. And as Rodriguez’s career shows, even being fortunate enough to gain entry to the class of artists who “make it big” is no guarantee of economic security.
Something has soured in America; on the one hand, we have come to see excellence in the arts as a glorified hobby. That mindset is what those who cling to the identity of themselves as professionals hope to protect themselves against. On the other hand, we have come to see gainful employment in a very narrow sense, and are incredibly judgmental against anyone who chooses to forge a path outside the employment system. Unless they are celebrities. Then, having been blessed by the “market,” they’re the exception to the rule. But most of us are not really satisfied by this, which is why we have to invent myths for ourselves to justify the way we treat artists who haven’t won the fame lottery, like, for example, the 1995 film Mr. Holland’s Opus, the plot of which features a talented musician forced to choose between practicing his art and supporting his family. The film’s perspective uncritically takes the conservative point of view that the emotional rewards for such a sacrifice make the sacrifice worth it, that Holland’s “opus” was really a well-lived life and not his music. But why should such a choice be necessary at all? Only because we have chosen, and continue to choose to accept the celebrity/professional model as legitimate and sustainable. But what if hard working, talented artists like my father could operate small cottage industries practicing their art? What if we agreed that art is less a commodity and more a public service, and that, like all civil servants, artists should be able to make a living doing what they are very good at doing?
There’s hope, though. A lot of musicians are starting to attempt different models. One of my favorite bands, Over The Rhine, funded their last album entirely by a Kickstarter-like campaign through their website and were so successful at it that they’ve chosen to do so again. Another favorite, Mike Doughty, is selling individual, unique recordings of songs. That works for them because they already have fan bases.
Secondly, the idea that the arts are the domain of trained professionals and large corporations rather than something to be practiced and enjoyed by everyday people ultimately means less art, less fun, and more boring junk for sale in place of art. Singers compete on reality show contests like “The Voice” and “American Idol” for the chance to win the fame lottery, but the best, most memorable music rarely comes from immediately predictable sources. I’m reminded of an anecdote I heard recently about how, when Sam Cooke played Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ In The Wind” for Bobby Womack, Womack wondered what Cooke saw in a song performed by a singer with such an unusual voice. “From now on,” Cooke replied, “it’s not going to be about how pretty the voice is. It’s going to be about if the singer is telling the truth.” Cooke, inspired, went on to write “A Change Is Gonna Come.”
But would a young Bob Dylan even have a career in today’s music industry? I wonder. Thanks to the Internet and the growing gap between the incomes of the super-rich and everyone else, the celebrity-based system is crumbling, and the fame lottery doesn’t yield a lot of quirky, interesting, truly creative artists. Mike Doughty, who I mentioned above, is worried about the effect that this shift will have on future musicians. Record labels used to rely on the personal relationships between their A&R people and the artists, and used to offer artist contracts long enough to allow them to grow and develop a fan base. That, in turn allowed bands like Radiohead, or Doughty’s original band, Soul Coughing, to make music that appealed to a niche group of fans while they grew as musicians and learned their craft.
But over time, the labels have put less and less money into artist development, and most resources are focused on creating celebrities. The idea that a band can sell forty or fifty thousand albums a year and make a middle-class living under the old system is dead or dying.
Which brings me back to Bowie. The Next Day has been streaming for free on iTunes for two weeks. I’ve listened to it three or four times a day since it was first made available. (Yes, it’s that good.) I’m going to buy it when it is released next week. That small idea, that by offering something for free, an artist can create a relationship with a fan, and encourage the fan to buy product, has been one of the few ideas that has kept artists afloat in the Internet age. But it isn’t enough, because that sort of offering tends to usually reward the already-famous. What we need is a new approach – a more humane system that treats artists like what they do matters and is a public service – because it does, and it is.
Noli Me Tangere by Traci Brimhall (who I’m a little mad at because my poem titled “Noli Me Tangere” – Latin for “touch me not” – the words Christ said to the Marys when they discovered him resurrected – is not nearly as good as Ms. Brimhall’s.)
Since I just started Bestiary Magazine a few months ago, a project into which I pour a considerable amount of my time, it might seem strange that I’m asking this question, but I think it’s an interesting one. Writers try to get into these journals for a multitude of reasons; some believe its a necessary part of creating or maintaining a writing career for themselves, some do it because they’ve been told by someone else (a teacher, a writer they admire, friends) that it’s a necessary part of being a writer, and some do it because they see that other writers do.
Very few, I imagine, do it for fun, which seems backward to me. Literary journals in general, and poetry journals in specific have incredibly small circulations. Poetry Magazine, for example, which is one of the most popular and well-funded poetry journals, has a circulation of 30,000. That’s about one tenth of one percent of the population of the United States. By comparison, The New Yorker‘s circulation is almost 1.1 million — that’s 36 times the circulation of Poetry.
This is where the whole “art for art’s sake” argument will usually get brought to the table, and my response to that philosophy is to counter with one of my own: art for fun’s sake. I have a lot of complex overlapping reasons for reading and writing poetry, but the best summary of them all is that I read and write poetry because I enjoy doing so. It’s fun.
That, incidentally, is also why I participate in the social activities surrounding poetry reading and writing – activities like poetry readings, workshops, poetry slams, and trying to get published – because I enjoy all of those things. I enjoy meeting new poets, encountering new poems, and seeing where my poems fit in to all of that. The one thing I am not trying to do is make a career, or make money out of the venture, which, I know sounds like I’m advocating “art for art’s sake,” but I’m insistent that I’m not: I don’t have anything close to the high-minded ideals of people who do things because they’re artists. I imagine that if I liked golf or fishing or scrapbooking or the stock market I’d do those things with just as much passion and interest as I do reading and writing.
If the game of getting poems published in literary journals were not fun for me, I wouldn’t do it. And there’s no real compelling reason other than fun that I can think of to do it. One rarely, if ever, reaches new readers via such a medium; most of the people who buy and read literary magazines are other practicioners. If my own experience working for the several literary publications I’ve been a part of holds true across all literary journals, the number one demographic of buyers for a given issue is the people who were published in that issue and their loved ones. The second-highest demographic is people hoping to get published or who already have been published.
The best method for getting published frequently is to do what my friend James called “carpet-bombing” — to literally constantly send out poems to any and all journals until someone picks your poem up. That’s a full-time job with a pretty low rate of return.
That is why a great many of the poets I know who started in the poetry slams are uninterested in getting published: why do all that work for pretty much no reward other than being able to add another title to one’s bio?
Fun is the only satisfactory answer I can come up with. So here’s my unanswered question: why don’t more literary journals try to make the whole process more fun for the poets?
This fabulous blog posting over at the Ploughshares site is a must-read. Although Alicia Jo Rabins, the author, doesn’t mention performed poetry or the slam at all, I think the article applies perfectly to performed poetry and highlights two aspect of performance that I think are part of what makes it essential for to my writing process:
enacting writing community as a team sport–another performative act which is by nature imperfect, lived out in time and through bodies, more analogous to writing a poem than to having written one. Some poets retain a vivid sense of live performance even on the page; Allen Ginsberg is among them. Perhaps partly because he structured his line-lengths in “Howl” according to the length of his breaths, you can feel the physicality in the poem; you can feel the poem breathing on the page. It doesn’t feel like an artifact.
This is something I’ve been stressing to a lot of the “page” poets I know — that imperfection is what marks really interesting and powerful writing. I read an interview with Thom Yorke of Radiohead in The Believer recently in which Yorke describes Jonny Greenwood’s role in the band, which includes encouraging the band to “add some wrong notes” to the music. One of the analogies I like to use is of a cubic zirconia — being synthetic, a cubic zirconia is flawless, and it’s this lack of flaw that makes one distinguishable from a diamond to the naked eye.
Then there’s this:
Witnessing the real risk of process is one reason why artistic community (the workshop, the residency, the collaboration) is so important. We celebrate each other’s successes, but we also observe the fruitful disasters, the failures that inherently attend real risk-taking. Through thoughtful critique, we help each other to consider those failures without attachment–simply to compost them and harvest the richness they contain, to deepen the process, and refine the work.
The “risk of process” is something I think slams especially bring to poetry. Of course it doesn’t always work, and of course, people who are there to win instead of the have fun and learn will miss out on this and end up making poems that game the system more than they do any of the things I find most interesting and useful about poems, but for myself, I find that putting a poem in front of an audience to be judged by non-experts often highlights that risk. There are other kinds of risk. I’d never substitute a slam for an actual critique from a trusted critic or for a good workshop. But it becomes another, very gritty arena in which to take risks with my poems, and it becomes a location for the community. There are other arenas, of course. Shows like The Encyclopedia Show emphasize the communal aspect of creation. The show’s curators prescribe topics and give writers a month to compose their poems. This simple restriction requires the writer to step outside her usual subject matter, often resulting in really powerful, interesting writing.
The whole thing is really quite insightful, and there’s a great video interview with Allen Ginsberg posted in the article. Go check it out.
