Celebrating the Strangeness of Art
Sometimes art comforts but it is not only comforting. Sometimes it disturbs but it is not only disturbing.
Dear friends,
I have been thinking a lot about the purpose of art lately. Last week, I asked if you could mention in your comments (for which, buíochas ó chroí, thanks from the heart) lines of poetry that you call to mind to hold you together.
You mentioned beautiful lines: some well known poems (hallo Rilke) and some poems that were more spontaneous: something someone you love once said that’s rested in you as a poem.
All of this makes me think of the purpose of art. And, I suppose it’s important to say that art has no singular purpose. Someone once spat ochre on their hand, and slapped their hand onto the wall of a cave. We do not know if that person had a name for themselves. We do not know their capacity for language, or communication. We know their capacity for survival, and we also know their need for self expression. There it is, on a wall, evidence of being alive.
That’s one of the things that art can be: something that says someone was here, too. Is it a sign? It can be. Is it a reassurance? Perhaps. Could it be a threat? Perhaps yes, also. Is it something that was bigger than the individual themselves? Did they do it because they were seized with an impulse they couldn’t contain? Did they return to it from time to time saying I made that, and it is part of me, and more than me? Yes and yes and yes. I believe.
Sometimes art comforts but it is not only comforting. Sometimes it disturbs but it is not only disturbing.
I think about this all the time when it comes to poetry. I like the idea that a poem can do something — it can reassure, it can elicit, it can evoke, it can recall — but I do not like the idea that there is only one “something” a poem can do. A poem is a little burst of words (or, if it’s a longer poem, a not-so-little burst of words) that is a terse explosion on the page that is going to do something different in the minds of different people at different stages of their lives.
All my life I’ve recited WB Yeats’ poem “To A Child Dancing In the Wind” to myself. I’ve known it by heart since I was fourteen. I love it, the music of it, the distance of it, the way an older person looks at a child dancing on the shore. I’m 47 in a few days, and now, I recite it to myself in a different way than I could as a teenager. It has changed its meaning for me. It was never about one thing. It is about a tension set up between me and it. A poem is “a little machine for remembering itself” the Scottish poet Don Patterson says, and I love that line. Who is being remembered?
Art has a strangeness at its heart. A poem doesn’t completely know itself because it’s waiting to be discovered in its discordant engagement with its readers. I celebrate the strange in art, and celebrate the hesitant art of saying, “This is what a poem might mean,” rather than, “This is what a poem means.” Hinemoana Baker’s poem that we’re featuring in Poetry Unbound this coming week marks the reopening of a gallery in a city devastated by an earthquake. What is it that a gallery means? Strangeness is one of them. And Molly Twomey’s poem has a moment where someone is told that their love will need to change. Gentle, abrupt. Art arrests as well as addresses.
I’d love to hear from you about a time when art did something strange for you, something uncontainable. Perhaps you were bothered by it, or unable to get it out of your mind. Share with us the strangeness of art. Let us not correct each other by telling each other what we should have gotten from it; rather, let us share the strange doors that art has opened in us.
Friends, the Irish word for place is áit. The Irish word for strange is ait. A small acute accent marks the difference between place and strange. Let us honour the strangeness of the place of art in us all.
Pádraig
PS: In case you missed last week’s episodes of Poetry Unbound, you might spend some time this afternoon with Gabeba Baderoon’s “The pen” and Jennifer Huang’s “Departure.” I hope you’ll enjoy.
Thanks to the lovely people at Waterstones for hosting the first in a series of launch events for Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World in this corner of the globe. I’ll be back in Ireland this coming week, and it’d be great to meet some of you at the events below. Friends in America and elsewhere waiting for the release in your region, you can put in your pre-order here.
Books Upstairs Dublin (D’Olier St, Dublin 2): Monday, October 10, 6pm local time *** free admission, but do email campaigns@canongate.co.uk to let them know you’re coming (so we can make enough tea)
Crescent Arts Centre Belfast: Tuesday, October 11, 6pm local time
Fifteen years ago, I was at a reading being given by Tony Hoagland. It was my first exposure to his work. For the first half of the reading, I was delighted by the penetrating humor and bite of his poems. But then he read his poem “Lucky”, a raw and complex summation of his lifelong struggle with an overbearing mother. He read this poem with what I can only describe as an impossible degree of tenderness; a tone which seemed in pitched conflict with the sometimes very sharp teeth of the poem’s content. When it was done, I began sobbing uncontrollably, as if an explosive had been detonated inside my chest. A young mother sitting next to me spontaneously pulled me into her arms, offering consolation as I wept for ten minutes. I couldn’t have seen it coming, and didn’t quite understand what had happened for a long time. All I knew at that moment was that this experience forever expanded my understanding of what poetry can do.
When I was 14, our English teacher assigned us an artist to research for a paper. Everyone was given a different artist: Manet, Monet, DaVinci, etc. I was assigned Georgia O'Keefe. In researching her at CSULB library, I discovered a series of photographs of O'Keefe taken by Alfred Stieglitz. My suburban, dualistic, things are either right or wrong, upbringing was completely unprepared for them. They were sensual, but not sexy, attractive but not beautiful, unsettling but irresistible. Those images have stayed with me for the last 40 years, and now, in my memory, they were my first exposure to art that both compels and repels and a doorway into the complexity and paradox of human relationship. I hated those pictures at the time, but now, I see them as the first step toward seeing the world as a whole, without moral judgement. The world that art can show us.