Showing posts with label critical consciousness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label critical consciousness. Show all posts

12.14.2016

Momentary stay, with confusion

For the past couple years, at least, I've been digging along in the trenches, or the mole-hole, of Ravenna Diagram, my long processional day-by-day poem.  It might be nice to try messing with this blog as I used to, with off-the-cuff observations & ponderings.  I have 15 minutes here before I have to go pick up Sophie, my granddaughter, from her school - what can I say in 15 minutes?

As I say, Ravenna D. absorbs most of my so-called mental concentration now.  But fleeting thoughts today...

"Detachment."  Is it possible an artist/poet might show a kind of natural capacity for detachment from his/her own work, and from the field of poetry generally?

Is such detachment perhaps necessary for substantial creative works?

I'm thinking about how poetic movements, fashions - fundamental changes in styles and thematic concerns - actually happen.  Perhaps they have to culminate in a level of conscious choice, of principle.  Some awareness, self-consciousness of one's cultural-historical situation, and of what might be possible.

This seemingly would require some mode of detachment - the ability to stand back, see things from "the outside".

Which for me anyway gets to a question about "tradition" in poetry.  Is there such a thing?  What does it mean?

Is it possible that the real & authentic creative effort we call "poetry" is very much caught up in a kind of artistic consciousness - a sort of retrospective "memory" - which is both involved, integrated - and detached from its processes and perspectives?

I guess the word often used is "critical" consciousness.

I must run... more later?  Who knows.