Saturday, April 15, 2006
Usually rejected
Public confession is not my style--that sort of thing is better left to the MFA crowd. They are so much better at it than I--and so much more in practice. But for just this once, a bit of biography might help in assessing the effectiveness of the Prosthetic Imagination. Here's my deepest secret: I can't write. At least I can't write poetry. A long time ago I tried and tried and tried. I even had a mentor, Ken Smith, a wonderful man, who did his best to help me. We managed to get a few of my pieces published, here and there. But I so wanted to be like him, write like he wrote, publish where he published. There was one journal in particular that I kept sending things to (a favorite resting place for his poetry), along with very clever cover letters, until they just had to accept one.
No one has ever savored a Walter Mitty moment more. While I waited for my complimetary copy to arrive, I dreamed of the tenured job at a southern university that was almost certainly only a few months off. I was on my way!
And then the journal came, a special edition, with a crushing theme: Poems we ususally reject.
The point? When ETC, Erica, and I collaborate, they really are the writers, because I just plain can't. I've proven that to my satisfaction (or dismay). My job is to emendate, correct, and tend to the typology. Oh yes--and write the clever cover letters. That I can still do. Here's an example.
When a user straps on the Prosthetic Imagination, she is freed from the messy tasks of having to think of something to write and of saying that thing in some new and compelling way. Users can just wallow in the oceans of words ETC leaves behind, move them about, discard the unpleasant ones, replace bits and pieces of them with texts gleaned from reference books, the daily newspaper, or the World Wide Web. Fun for sure. But also a way of art making that really does drape poetic flesh on a computational skeleton, upon which the entire process is dependent. A way of art making that, little-by-little, is elbowing its way into the avante-garde, and just maybe, the blue-chip literati.
BTW: Walter Mitty would have understood. And no doubt dreamed of sweeping Erica off her feet.
# posted by Jim @ 7:43 PM 
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Oops! I'd forgotten the spelling and rather than look it up for real, I just googled "Walter Middy." Looks like lots of folks were as lazy as I.
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