What do you do when you reach the right margin? What to do if you don’t want to turn back to the page but keep going? Alas the limitation of a piece of paper!
Is the poetic expression controlled by the size of a piece of paper? Or should the paper find a way to accommodate the expression? If words fall off the edge of the paper (Is it allowed?) where will they go? Who will catch them?
“Beethoven wrote a sonata that was out of the piano’s range of his time.” Composer Henry Cowell said in an interview regarding Charles Ives, “Some composers write for instruments as they find them. Others insist that one be built for the music they hear in their mind.”
Everyone in our society welcomes the new, welcomes innovation: it warms the cockles of their hearts. Yet when faced with actual innovation, their hearts freeze over: the innovation doesn’t fit the categories they have carefully laid out! The malfeasant artist views the tumbling of categories with equanimity, even with pleasure. Let them fall! Let metagenesis thrive! Charles Ives wondered whether a song always had to be something that could be sung. And Robinson Jeffers: “Old violence is never too old to beget new values.” The opening of the mind to possibility is always to some degree a closing of the dull, drab door of actuality. But doesn’t that door lead to where we live? “Madness.”
Get a bigger piece of paper or shout it out the window or commit to the digital world. It’s just the medium. And the mind of the artist? It’s only of consequence to the artist: the Other mind will alter it into something unrecognizable anyway.
When one dispenses with form what one finds is form, either a new form or the old form reasserting itself because it fundamental and has to be; this reassertion is what happens more often than not. Scrape some skin off your arm and what grows there? More of your skin; this has to be.
And the artist who says, “I’m the Avant-Garde!” is already passe.
the scroll, the scroll
Steve, you just said “I’m the Avant-Garde!”
So I must be passe!
yes sir, that means i’m passe!
When I first visited SF Chinatown from Beijing in 1998, I felt like a foreigner in a place I supposed to feel familiar. Eight years later in 2006, I moved to San Francisco and Chinatown is the magic place where I am always lucky to meet people who seem to belong to the old times. First the herbalist on Jackson st., then guqin teacher on Mason st. and yesterday I met you at the cultured gathering!
I liked the voice of you reading poems in Cantonese and English, and noticed how beautiful the Chinese calligraphy on your book of Xu Zhimo after I came back home.
Thank you, Clara, for a memorable gathering.