The World Has No Interest in What We Do
Your writing “doesn't have to be socially powerful to be worthwhile, meaningful and important... Be content to touch what you touch."
I’m writing this newsletter on Labor Day, the second Labor Day of the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when we’ve been given much cause to think about the people who make up our workforce—and about our own relationship to labor and capital. “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will,” went an old slogan; if we’ve learned anything in recent years, it’s that “work” has a way of claiming more than its allotted eight hours, for blue-collar and white-collar workers alike.
If you’ve been working from home this last year and a half, perhaps you’ve come to realize just how little of the eight-or-more hours your employer took out of your day was actually spent working. Perhaps you’ve been folding that time back into your work…or perhaps you’ve used it to get more done around the house, or even to pursue “what we will” more consciously.
Whether you’ve consciously scaled back to a six-hour day or a four-day week, or you’re just looking for something creative to do with all that time you used to spend scanning social media or walking the path between your desk and the coffee machine, I hope you’ll find some inspiration (and practical tips) in this newsletter. If you aren’t subscribed yet, how about now? It’s free, and it’s going to stay that way.
On September 3, the poet Danielle Rose offered a stark assessment of poetry’s relevance to the world at large on Twitter—to wit, the world at large doesn’t really care, or even take notice. Many poets and poetry fans took offense at her statement, and pushed back—hard. In response, Rose doubled down: “I have no attachment to poetry,” she tweeted. “Poetry could disappear tomorrow, and I'd find a different way to do what I do. Containers are just containers.”
This is, I think, exactly the right attitude to take towards one’s work.
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for any length of time, that might surprise you. After all, I’ve spent much of the last three years encouraging people to cultivate writing practices in order to, fundamentally, become better versions of themselves. I’ve told writers that what they do has the power to change someone’s life—starting with their own—and that this power, more than financial success, more than celebrity, is what makes a writing practice worthwhile.
So why am I agreeing with someone who says poetry is of little social significance?
Perhaps you’ve seen me mention before that if you want to get rich or famous, there are a lot of better career paths than writing. Similarly, I guess now I can add that if you want to change the world, you’d be better off becoming an activist or a politician than a poet or a novelist.
For the last two hundred years or so, poetry’s champions have been pointing to that line by Shelley about poets being “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” and thanks to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, people have a vague notion that “we are the movers and shakers of the world for ever, it seems.” Ironically, few could tell you that the line originated with the late 19th-century poet Arthur O'Shaughnessy, not Gene Wilder (or even Roald Dahl).
Yet there’s little recognition of how Shelley’s essay “In Defence of Poetry” is an extremely hyperbolic work—that it claims, for example, just about anything genuinely useful in philosophy or the sciences was in fact the product of the poetic imagination. Personally, I find his argument glibly optimistic, and his definitions of poetry as “the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds… [which] turns all things to loveliness” overly narrow.
At its worst, the legacy of Shelley’s essay is an insular culture of poets who congratulate each other on their brilliance (or, occasionally, resent each other’s successes). On a more ordinary level, we might easily recognize the kind of “toxic positivities” Rose suggests stem from buying into “the delusion that poetry is something powerful” playing out on an individual level. The inflated sense of self-importance, the confusion of selfishness with artistic “integrity,” that sort of thing—and not just among the poets, either.
But between the two statements I’ve quoted, Danielle Rose said something else:
“Poetry doesn't have to be socially powerful to be worthwhile, meaningful and important. There is no requirement for much of anything in poetry. This is an ultimate freedom to do what you believe will be best for you and those around you. Be content to touch what you touch.”
In some ways, I feel like anything I might add would simply be a gloss on that. So just let it sink in for a little bit before we get to the really wild part of the story.
Because Danielle Rose wasn’t just a poet. She was also the poetry editor of a literary magazine called Barren, and when Rose said what she said about poetry, a bunch of snitches went to the people in charge of Barren and complained. This is how editor-in-chief and publisher Jason D. Ramsey responded:
“…We exist to uplift the global arts community, and to showcase its passion and vigor through a unique aesthetic. We absolutely and firmly believe in the power of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and photography… While we can certainly appreciate a good debate with polarizing opinions, our official stance regarding Danielle Rose’s tweet from yesterday is that poetry is an extremely powerful art form. And while it may feel that we poets and writers are screaming into the void, the fact is that people are in fact listening.
After discussion regarding misalignment of the Barren Magazine vision, Danielle has agreed to part ways with us as Poetry Editor.”
You read that right: Barren cut Rose loose because of her ideological nonconformity over poetry. Even though, as Ramsey went on to concede in his statement, “Danielle has been an integral part of our team for the last several months, and has helped to bring forth two incredible issues.”
I don’t spend any particular amount of time in the world of literary magazines, so I can’t speak to the incredibleness of those two issues of Barren, and will take Ramsey’s word that Rose’s contribution was integral. I will admit I find it remarkable that this is the first that Ramsey had heard, in all this time, of Rose’s beliefs regarding the social and cultural weight of poetry, or its true value.
As it happens, I don’t have much use for “cancel culture” rhetoric. I believe that a certain amount of openmindedness to ideological variety is a useful thing, once we as a society have decided what is simply unacceptable. (If you can track down a copy of Stanley Fish’s There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech…and It’s a Good Thing, Too, read it!) On a practical level, however, people tend to be comfortable around people who share their values, and since I don’t particularly care to associate with people who hold views I find untenable to the point of being repellent, I can’t really fault anybody else for feeling the same way.
I just find “poetry [is/is not] a powerful driving force for cultural change” to be a very weird place to draw one’s line in the sand.
Although I could end things there, I want to return to Rose’s declaration of a “lack of attachment to poetry.” (There’s a Buddhist component to this I’ve deliberately elided over today, but if you’re curious, pay closer attention to Rose’s writing!) As useful as I think it is to develop a steady, consistent writing practice, and in doing so to find, among other things, your particular creative voice, I’d also discourage you from becoming overly reliant on one kind of writing.
To be clear, I’m not saying you should be constantly mixing things up, experimenting with new forms—if you’ve found a mode of writing that works for you, whether that’s poetry or fiction or the personal essay or whatever, you should absolutely mine that vein as deeply as you can, as long as it’s providing you with an outlet to say the things you most want to say. Every time you sit down to write, you’re asking yourself: What matters most to me? If what you’re writing successfully answers that question, hooray!
But if you sit down one day and you pick up your pen or open your laptop and you realize, after a while, that you’re not writing anything you find truly meaningful, that you’re going through the motions or worse yet not coming up with anything at all, then you need to consider taking a step back, relinquishing the form you’ve chosen for your writing so you can find a new way to reconnect with the substance of your work.
Frankly, I find Rose’s straightforward detachment, her willingness to accept that possibility, rather impressive, because the prospect of having to reinvent my creative voice on such a massive scale intimidates me more than a little. Could I find another way to express myself if I no longer had a newsletter, if I were no longer able to write these kinds of essays? I like to think I could, but I know it would take a lot of work.
On the other hand, if I look at what I already do as reinventing my voice a little bit each day, constantly refining my ability to identify and express my deepest concerns, maybe under those circumstances the prospect of a lot of work ahead might seem a little less daunting.
I’ve already invited you to subscribe to Destroy Your Safe and Happy Lives, so here at the end I’d like to ask you a favor: If you liked this article, if you found it helpful to your own writing practice, and you know somebody else who might find it helpful too, would you pass it along to them? You don’t even need to pitch them on subscribing; fingers crossed, they’ll make that decision on their own. Thanks—see you again soon!
The “Eight Hours” artwork is by Ricardo Levins Morales. (Get it on a poster!)