Category: Craft (Page 14 of 18)

Earlier this year I did a piece on Vanessa Place's political twitter project, talking about the pitfalls of confronting racism in America with art pieces.

Since then, I've come across more stories about art pieces dealing with racism that have bombed miserably:

– Kenneth Goldsmith attempting to read the autopsy of Michael Brown, one of the past year's victims of police violence.

– The Vanessa Place Gone with the Wind tweet project.

  – And the San Francisco Bay Area collective's Berkely effigies

It was the effigy story that changed my mind about the issue. In that article you will see elaboration on why these art pieces have continually been read as offensive and not thought-provoking. In the effigy case, the collective artists were black. They describe themselves as "queer black and PoC" (people of color).

So, even when the artists were black, the same results are happening.  The article on the effigy was educational: it seems when there is no clear meaning of intent, offense always trumps the message (for lack of a clear message).  Intent, when obscured, is highly disrupted:

"the effigies' powerful message was muted, if not canceled out, by the unclear intent. 'The relief does not negate the initial trauma,' said the Rev. Michael Bride."

…"What would have happened, he asked, "if swastikas started popping up everywhere and were intended to be a teachable tool to remind people about the Holocaust but no one was there to associate them with the lesson?"

Before, I've tended to sympathize with the misunderstood protesters. You have to engage with art before you condemn it. If you're not going to read the piece fully, you surrender the strength of your own position.

But when you are dealing abstract artists who deal in statements, by definition, that are without context, the pieces cannot be read fully. And this is why they appear racist.

Similarly, this was one of the recent complaints about pink-ifying everything for breast cancer. In this recent story about the pink balloons flying in downtown New York City, the objects are meant to symbolize exercise and diet in fighting breast cancer but there is no signage connecting the symbol to the idea.

"Outside the New York Sports Club on West 41st Street in Manhattan, pink and white crepe paper wraps the poles propping up a scaffold to protect pedestrians from construction debris. Tied to the poles are pink and white balloons and pink crepe paper flowers. Although there is no sign saying so, the decorations are to make women aware that exercise and diet can reduce their risk for breast cancer, said Lisa Hufcut, public relations director for Town Sports International, the parent company. And to make them aware of the importance of mammograms, she added."

Talk about a message getting lost in the design. This is the, unfortunately, one of the problems abstract art gestures (and pieces signifying informational disconnect) have left us with.

User X designer Joel Marsh published a blog post about the differences between sketching ideas with pencil, using computer software, and working solely in your head. He says the worst way is working it all though in your head because you are very limited in memory and database retrieval.

There are some new theories for conceptualist poets to chew on: new ways of thinking about the free agency of “I” where the author says,

“The same goes for all of us, almost all the time. We think we're smart; we're confident we won't be unconsciously swayed by the high list price of a house. We're wrong.”

It sounds obvious and I’m always saying this but, nevertheless, writing is thinking and we have, over the years, managed to separate the craft of writing, (the lightly intellectual tinkering with words), from the art of keeping our critical thinking skills refined.

I was reminded of this reading The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking by Richard Paul and Linda Elder who are from The Foundation for Critical Thinking. I received my copy of this booklet from the faculty admin trashcan at IAIA where it was addressed to a teacher long since gone.

Yes, sometimes my reading comes from trash cans.

The book covers elements of thought, levels of thought, intellectual traits and types of questions. It has a reasoning checklist, a template for analyzing your own logic and has a template for problem solving and assessing research.

Even if your poetry challenges some of the structures and assumptions of reasoning and logic, to write poems with no understanding of more sophisticated systems of thinking is to limit yourself, your poetry and your message. As they say, to break it well you gotta know how well it breaks.

But what interests me more, of course, is the narcissism of thinking you know it all already. In fact, that’s the big narcissistic mind-fuck of our modern age: we think we’re all pretty sharp scissors but such is part and parcel of our many self-delusions. Poets go even further with this affectation of their own brilliance. I’ve met quite a few who like to assume that because they write poems, they’re a type of instant intellectual.

Which is why my favorite part of the book deals with “Intellectual Standards and Traits” which, as the booklet says, form part of your inner voice. They break down Intellectual Standards into:

Clarity: Is the writer clear on the issue being addressed? Does the piece lack elaboration? Remember the goal of this kind of writing isn’t language theory, it’s strictly, (relatively), successful communication.

Accuracy: Does the writer speak in true statements? Their example is “Most dogs weigh more than 300 pounds.” Some facts are indisputably false. Which is not to say there aren’t good poems out there full of 300 pound dogs.

Precision: Does the piece provide detail and specificity or does it deal in vague generalities?

Relevance: How do the examples bear on the issue? Is the point irrelevant?

Depth: Is the piece dealing with the most significant factors? Their example is the superficial response of the Reagan administration to drugs with the “Just Say No” campaign which failed to deal with complexities of the issue.

Breadth:  Does the piece address other points of view?

Logic: Do the arguments follow each other logically?

Fairness:  Is the piece written in good faith? Are Facts distorted, biased, tainted by vested interests?  “We naturally think from our own perspective, from a point of view which tends to privilege our position.  Fairness implies treating all relevant viewpoints alike…[this is] especially important when the situation may call us to see things we don’t want to see, or to give something up that we want to hold onto.”

Then the book delves into the Intellectual Traits. These, I find, are what many poets, (most artists actually), are lacking in socially if not artistically:

Intellectual Humility (versus Intellectual Arrogance)
“A consciousness of the limits of one’s knowledge, including a sensitivity to circumstances in which one’s native egocentrism is likely to function self-deceptively…recognizing that one should not claim more than one actually knows. [This is] not spinelessness or submissiveness…[but a] lack of intellectual pretentiousness, boastfulness, or conceit, combined with insight into the logical foundations, or lack of such foundations of one’s beliefs.”

Intellectual Courage (versus Intellectual Cowardice)
“Consciousness of the need to face and fairly address ideas, beliefs or viewpoints toward which we have strong, negative emotions and to which we have not given a serious hearing…recognition that ideas considered dangerous or absurd are sometimes rationally justified (in whole or in part) and that conclusions and beliefs inculcated in us are sometimes false or misleading …We need courage to be true to our own thinking in such circumstances. The penalties for nonconformity can be severe.”

[I’d like to add an addendum to my comments last week about Mark Twain. Sometimes the penalties of nonconformity can be ostracization from both sides of the issue, those whom you are defending and those whom you are fighting against!]

Intellectual Empathy (versus Intellectual Narrow-mindedness)
To imaginatively put oneself in the place of others in order to genuinely understand them…to reason from premises, assumptions, and ideas other than our own. Correlates with the willingness to remember occasions when we were wrong in the past despite an intense conviction that we were right, and with the ability to imagine our being similarly deceived in a case-at-hand.”

Intellectual Automony (versus Intellectual Conformity)
“Rational control of one’s beliefs, values and inferences…one’s thought processes. Commitment to analyzing and evaluation beliefs on the basis of reason and evidence, to question when it is rational to question, to believe when it is rational to believe and to conform when it is rational to conform.”

Intellectual Integrity (versus Intellectual Hypocrisy)
“[To be] consistent…[to] hold one’s self to he same rigorous standards of evidence and proof to which one holds one’s antagonists, to practice what one advocates for others, and to honestly admit discrepancies and inconsistencies in one’s own thought and action.”

[Were we ever rigorous thinkers, we Americans? If so, we’ve become fat and lazy thinkers, which brings me to…]

Intellectual Perseverance (versus Intellectual Laziness)
“In spite of difficulties, obstacles, frustrations…[and] the irrational opposition of others, to struggle with confusion and unsettled questions over an extended period of time to achieve deeper understanding or insight.”

Confidence in Reason (versus distrust in reason and evidence)
“…despite the deep-seated obstacles in the native character of the human mind and in society as we know it.”

Fair-mindedness (versus Unfairness)
“Treat all viewpoints alike, without reference to one’s own feelings or vested interest or the feelings or vested interests of one’s friends, community or nation.”

The booklet also elaborates on the problem of Egocentric Thinking: “Humans do not naturally consider the right and needs of others…[do] not naturally appreciate the point of view of others nor the limitations in our own point of view. We become explicitly aware…only if trained to do so.” Otherwise, we’re left with “our own egocentric assumptions, the egocentric way we use information…interpret data…the implications of our egocentric thought. We do not naturally recognize our self-service perspective…As humans we live with the unrealistic but confident sense that we have fundamentally figured out the way things actually are and that we have done this objectively. We naturally believe in our intuitive perceptions—however inaccurate.”

There’s also a list of self-centered psychological standards from wish fulfillment to group think to innate selfishness. These self-centered standards are kissing cousins to the list of mental biases and 30 Poems About Suffering.

There’s also a brief section on Sociocentric Thinking: “Most people do not understand the degree to which they have uncritically internalized the dominant prejudices of their society or culture. This phenomenon includes the “tendency to blindly conform to group restrictions, (many of which are arbitrary or coercive),” and the failure to “distinguish universal ethics from relativistic cultural requirements and taboos.” It also includes the “failure to realize that mass media in every culture shapes the news from the point of view of that culture.”

These are mental processes which, if ignored, will affect the types of poems you choose to write and read and the quality of every piece you write. You can be a technically savvy formalist or labratory-poet, but if your thinking is lazy, we all suffer for it.

…which I recognize not everybody is, it never hurts to understand the foundations of balance in other disciplines–whether you want to achieve it or wreck it!

When I was working as the Interim Faculty Admin at the Institute of American Indian Arts a few years ago, one of the instructors there was teaching from the book Composition in Art by Henry Rankin Poore. I was able to read a bit of it while I was there. The section on entrances and exits in pictures seemed particularly useful to a the composition of a poem as well:

“While mystery, subtlety and evasive charm all have their place in a work of art, they should not stand in the way of one necessary quality—immediate attraction. The picture should be like an open door to the view without anything blocking the threshold.”

“There must be one spot or area to which the other parts are subordinate and to which the eye is immediately attracted…[it] must be simple and uncluttered and have the essential ingredient of leading the eye on further into the picture. Any one element that stops the eye so powerfully that it simply cannot go on is destructive to the composition.”

“Getting out of the picture successfully is every bit as important as getting into it. This does not mean, however, backing out…The exit should be so carefully guarded that after the viewer’s eye has roamed about and seen everything, it comes upon the exit naturally. Providing two or more exits is a common error of bad composition.”

A little snack of food-thought.