A Paying Attention Moment?
I start looking through the essay about James Schuyler, reclusive New York School poet—this week's assignment in the prose poem class. It's only ever interesting up to a point to me. So much veers so quickly into the pedantic, the arbitrary, the textual analysis of who really cares. I feel like this is one of those "sit up and pay attention" moments, that yet again, am I kidding myself this literary life is really what I want to do?
I don't doubt I want to write; after this five years of solitude, of hard work, of testing myself, of fairly regularly showing up at the page, I think it's finally edged into a "have-to." But the study of literature, schools and fads and trends and the self-referential preciousness of a bunch of people who deified their creative life in New York City: do I have to care about that? Do I have to go back to school again to get another degree to gain admittance into the leagues of those who teach and thus have time taken away from being one who writes?
Oh, I now know I'll slog through the essay, put my judgments aside and use the poet's actual work as exemplar to edge me into something original of my own. But there is truly so much in this literary life I do not care about, that bores me, that doesn't hold my interest. So much writing that doesn't grab let alone turn me on. I now know I don't have to like all of it. Personal taste is just, personal, and discriminating. But I do wonder, why this reaction to the academic over and over again in my life. It isn't that I'm jealous, that I wish that life had been mine. I think it always comes back to that life outside the ivy walls has forever been more interesting to me. The living of a life, which is what I thought writers and artists were always all about. Could all this banding together in schools, all this industry of analysis and publish-or-perish, of categorization and collection of even one's bad teen poetry, one's every scrap of lists and letters simply be a way for people to break out of the isolation that a truly creative life is? And make some kind of living, fashion some kind of work for oneself (however onerous and boring and time-wasting) in the process?
