If art is a nation’s soul
If art is a nation’s soul
In my work on the land I have seen many living things stunted and deformed from the harsh realities that exist there. Some of the survivors are tough, hard-nosed little bastards that I find I admire greatly. Art forms, such as poetry and public bodies that support them can similarly face tough times, unable to flourish when neglected or under-funded by the society they stem from and nourish.
Yes, the artist will survive, most long enough at least to say something, they always do; but what treasures are lost when the living’s too hard? If art is a nation’s soul, we starve it at our peril while we feed the unworthy from the table of own self righteous ideology. Continue and we will, if we haven’t already done so, breed a tough, hard-nosed, bastard of a society, which for some reason we won’t admire at all.
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Space
Bookshelves;
Space on a commercial bookshelf is mainly reserved for the dead or those that fuck ducks or are peculiar in some other way, it also helps to live in London. This perhaps is not strictly true but it does appear to be thus at times for ‘normal poets’. Space on bookshelves is just incredibly difficult to come by and the reason is fairly simple to understand. Imagine for a moment that you own a small bookshop and your wages come from the books you sell. Each bookshelf then has to generate an income. Ideally you would like fast turnover high profit books to populate that space. Most poetry isn’t either of these so why would you give it prime space or any space at all.
You’ll see the standard ‘poetry section’ granted but these will be populated by well, mainly the dead and not the difficult. I never get miffed when poetry bookshop owners won’t stock any of my books; its a tough business and I’m just grateful not to be amongst the dead, I’ve also no inclination of fucking ducks and no intention of living in fucking London.
Space
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a silent voice
a silent voice
Poets;
A great many feel they need to tell me about the art of punctuation and grammar, I don’t know why, as a practising dyslexic open to years of abuse for my inability to see words and spell words ‘properly’ I’m no longer fucking interested. On the other hand, others just want to tell me how hard their life has been and show it in verse and I’m expected to care; the rub is I often do. Luckily most of the poems I receive fall into the latter but some are written by the full stop brigade for the sole purpose of being clever and part of being clever is to be published, it has nothing to do with art. Well fuck being published just for the sake of it, just so you can say “oh yes I’m published don’t you know” Get on with the art; think a bit deeper, produce books that have some vision some form of soul or at least try to. Publishing, if you’ve no greater reason for doing it than just ego, is a form of masturbation and nothing like the real thing.
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