The New Art and a Barbaric Yawp for Teens (and Adults!)

I would say Spring is really here in Moncton, after being surprised that the thermometer in my car read 15 degrees C (about 62 F or so). Walking is easier and sweatier. People are milling about downtown as if for the first time in their lives. This is my first spring in a winter city.

I have a project for this week before the Northrop Frye Festival: figure out how to make poetry thrilling for high school students. You heard right--this coming Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, I will be giving lectures and workshops at Moncton's premier English high schools. I have anywhere between one and two and a half hours to stand before twenty to thirty 17 year olds and state my case. In the words of the early nineties: gag me with a spoon!

Seriously, this is a good opportunity to reach lots of people, continue (at least on a small scale) the influence of poetry, which as you know is waning about as fast as Louisiana's coastline. So this weekend I am rereading old favorites and my own catalog to find the most compelling poems for young adults (that won't get me thrown out of Atlantic Canada).

As I was talking to my friend Kimberly about this over lunch, she and I were discussing which poems teenagers would be interested in, to which I suggested, "Only ones with the word ipod in the title." She said, "Or cellphones." While this was all sort of a joke, there is an inherent truth to the changing of the guards in art--and not only in thematic.

Weirdly enough, some of the best art that I've seen recently have been advertisement campaigns (especially billboards in the Paris metro). Movies have certainly replaced live theatre (sorry). And even pop music, those bastards who stole not only the fields of music but also of poetry (kidding, I listen to pop music), is not so much on the decline so much as relegated to another consumable that people can use to "identify" themselves to others with similar "tastes."
I read an article recently on a student at Yale who's senior art thesis is video tapes of her inducing miscarriages, which she obtained through artificial insemination and then herbal arbotificants, and then smearing the blood from these episodes in vaseline coated plastic wrap. Needless to say, this is ghastly and shocking to most people (who are human), regardless of what side of the abortion debate they're on. But consider, in 1863 at the salon in Paris, Edouard Manet unveiled the Olympia, which scandalized art viewers and critics by showing for the first time an unadorned and average nude whore, staring directly at the observer. But now, what it takes to shock us needs no subtlety: we are the shock and awe culture, we've seen it before.

Recently I saw the acclaimed film No Country for Old Man, something that everyone considers hyper-violent and not in a Kill Bill/300 kind of way. But for me the most shocking thing was not the gore or the captive bolt pistol or even the ultra-menacing Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh, it was how human I felt after I watched the film, how much I appreciated life, and how much I felt like we were all "in it together." Out of violence, there grew empathy.

And maybe this is the solution to both finding something to move children who live in seven minute periods between commercials and to the lack of soul in art today. Much writing, art, film, music, etc has nothing to do with a real connection with the Other, and its only communicative intent is to impress and sell. Great art now must shock you out of the consumerist loop, it must return you to a primal state wherein people are capable of caring for one another. And this extends well beyond the petty trappings of culture, demographic, writing movement, and any other dimension. This is why at least I do art. It is another ambition question, but one that holds an ultimatum: are you in with us humans or are you out?

You say you want a revolution?

The last I posted, if I recall, was about a hurricane, a storm, barrelling through Moncton, barrelling through my life, my work. And now, I am writing this on borrowed time in New Orleans. Don't worry: I will be back on my tour of duty later this week. It is probably forty to sixty degrees colder in Moncton right now than it is here. I would bet.

I honestly don't know what to say since I've last written. The last few months have given new meaning to the idea ruin value, at least for me. The idea of beautiful dissembling, the shards of a former reality shown to be nothing but dissimulations, just gaudy façades of a former, more idealistic era. I, of course, finished the first third of Evangeline. Now I write about the great exile North, a voluntary sequestering, a minor conquest, a minor treasure. I will begin the deconstruction of Acadie soon.

As far as travel goes, maybe I've lost myself in it. The idea of home doesn't quite exist the same way in French as it does in English. There is no direct translation with the nuance and aplomb of home. With the variegated images, the smell of vanilla, the warmth of flesh on flesh. Right now, it's as if I want to echo Duras's screenplay: ELLE: J'ai tout vu à Hiroshima. LUI: Non, tu n'as rien vu. I don't know anything.

Perhaps this is what le Grand Dérangement means afterall: the loss of knowledge, the annihilation of all the former myths you told about yourself, the endless and endless waiting for the next thing to define you, give you shelter, give you repose, devastate you. This will be the title for my second sequence in Evangeline, the part about driving to Canada: Le Grand Dérangement, the great upheaval, the great moving, the diaspora, the exile. You see, the difference in my telling is that the threat of exile is never from without, but from the self, the oblivion of the love relationship, and the comfort in thinking you know what the right thing to do is. The threat is volition.

If this is not indication enough, let me be clear: I am back in action.

Evangeline, virgin and martyr

There is an Acadian essay that begins with the sentence, Evangéline porte mal la mini-jupe (Evangeline wears a miniskirt poorly). She is the essence of holiness, you see, sanctified, what one would want the Acadians to be. The chosen people. Evangeline's white face is untouchable in the same way a magnolia bud is untouchable. You wouldn't want it to darken, be stained with the grime on your hands, the very filth of your skin-oil.

In Longfellow's poem, he shows the Acadians to be martyrs. All you Greek scholars will know that μαρτυρ or μαρτυρος does not mean to be persecuted, but to give witness. I wonder what the Acadians give witness to? What does Evangeline give witness to? Note this passage in the French translation:

Parfois elle venait, se croyant sans témoin,
Faible et lasse, s'asseoir au fond d'un cimitière.

(Sometimes she came, considering herself without witness,
weak and weary, to sit on the graveyard floor. [my translation])

This sentiment is not exactly the same in the original, which is:

Sometimes in the churchyards strayed, and gazed on the crosses and tombstones.

This admittedly is not Longfellow's finest verse. The difference is striking because the French version, which essentially brought about the renaissance acadienne in the 19th century, portrays Evangeline in despair. She is in despair because she looks only toward the past.

But it makes fine poetry, doesn't it, looking toward the past? This is the nostalgia of art, the regression I spoke of, passéisme. What else can we do in art?

I propose to force Evangeline into a miniskirt. I don't hide the fact that my poems are not about making anyone chaste. Maybe decadence is the only way to treat art. The realists sullied the delicious curves of Ingres. The impressionists distorted even these raw images. The modernists fragmented what was impressionistic. We've reached a point where it seems all art has been made or written. This is not true.

There will always be depravity and sentimentality. This is my currency. Art and literature has become too safe once again, obsessed with its own irony, its own cleverness. I deal only in the marginalia of relationships, torn papers kept to remember that lovers were once together, sexual awakening, liminality, the presence of the divine not trapped but freed in the confines of dirt and flesh. And so this is my Evangeline--a symbol of dolorous and ecstatic and shameful love, the passéisme of love. That is my μαρτυρια, my witness.

Regression as Poetics

Regression is the passéisme of the individual. Active nostalgia--maybe a kinder way of saying regression--is what fuels poetry. The corpus of any poem is littered by observations, memories, synesthesias, bits of conversation or language that have stuck. In the workshop, we would call these things images. Poetic creativity has nothing to do with creation, the spontaneous generation of language, but is really re-creation. It is the past, dressed up to be made presentable, enjoyable, cathartic, ruinous.

Perhaps this is a new phenomenon, with an origin in confessional poetry. The poet of today is obsessed with herself, even if this is not apparent from her work. Those images have to come from somewhere. We are no longer content, as readers, to deal with grand symbols, the metaphors of society, or historical tropes. This bores us. We want something shocking, moving, obliterating. At least we want cleverness.

This creates a bit of a problem for me in Moncton. I've written tons since I've been here, but nothing that takes into account the Acadian diaspora. All I've written about is homeland. Furthermore, I am obsessed with my own regression. I love reliving all of my emotional extremes, being hurt and elated all over again. I glorify the excreta of memories. This is my own sentimental scatology.

My project so far swirls around the schema of place. I've written poems with a day number and a place name, such as "Day One: Chauvin." I've covered a lot of ground. The aim is to finish in Moncton, or perhaps Port Royal, the former city (it is no longer as such) of my ancestors. In these poems, I am addressing the cities as lovers, and in doing so personify them, metamorph them into the bruised memories of lovers I've had in those places. Being with a poet is indeed a bad thing, because your life is now on display. Or at least the small details of your life: your movie ticket stubs, your birthday gifts, your manner of speaking, your flaws and infallibilities.

With the exception of one poem called Chicago, I haven't left Southern Louisiana. As my regression takes a firmer and more fatal hold, I may never.