Art, Craft and Voice

"Only the artist in yourselves is more truthful than the night."

e.e. cummings

I've heard rhetoricians talk of something they call "immanent orality" (yes, sometimes it's just that). The idea, which appeals to me, goes like this. All interpretation is about finding out how to read a text out loud. Nothing you can learn about a text's meaning is inconsequential for its enunciation. All footnotes to all poems are instructions for the reader reading aloud.

Laura Carter is obviously the e.e. cummings of the blogosphere. Absolutely modern and hopelessly romantic. In a word, hip.

Do not hate and fear the artist in yourselves, my fellow citizens. Honour him and love him. Love him truly--do not try to possess him. Trust him as nobly as you trust tomorrow.

That's cummings.

I think voice matters. I don't want it taken from me. I think it has something to do with being a person, which I think is a good thing. I hope that whatever I write has an indelible mark of me on it.

That's Laura. So is this:

If it is just about making objects, then forget it.

And here's cummings:

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little--somebody who is obsessed by Making.

"What a hoot!" says Laura. "Talking of voice as a device, as a thing to be manipulated," just as cummings warns us not to "confuse an act of God with something which can be turned on and off like the hot water in a faucet."

I think cummings is probably the most charming poet that ever lived; Laura Carter is certainly the most enchanting blogger. How can you not agree with them when they insist on the irreducible perfection of the individual soul that's just trying to do its own imperfect thing? How can we not encourage them when they express their hope that their works "are neither 'good' nor 'bad', neither peacelike nor warful--that (on the contrary) they are living." Life against judgment! Voice against the absolute tyranny of the workshop!

Well, when good poets, like Laura and e.e., say these sorts of things they are simply and irresistably endearing. We want to believe with them that a poem is a just (or even partly) an honest poet being herself, desperately so, in a world of "supermechanized submorons". After all: "mostpeople fancy a guaranteed birthproof safetysuit of nondestructible selflessness" (i.e., a kitten costume). After all: I, too, could be myself.

Every artist's strictly illimitable country is himself.

An artist who plays that country false has committed suicide; and even a good lawyer cannot kill the dead. But a human being who's true to himself--whoever himself may be--is immortal; and all the atomic bombs of all the antiartists in spacetime will never civilize immortality.

Which is all good and true if you're writing about Ezra Pound in 1945.

Before your immortality has been secured, before your honesty comes anywhere near to being interesting (or, perhaps more precisely, before your sincerity even approaches honesty) you have to use your voice for a long time, in public and among people who don't, as a point of departure, all find you very charming ("you and I are not snobs"). You have to enter an apprenticeship, you have to find a master craftsman and a workshop (though it need not be that workshop). You have to use your voice to find it, and what you are doing, finally, is not finding (trouver) but inventing (trouvèr) it: tinkering with what you were given at birth, finding out what it can usefully accomplish. The discipline that guides this usage is grammar, and mastery of grammar is craft.

Bibliographical note: All quotations not attributed to Laura Carter (here, but no doubt not for long) are taken from Chapter 4 of e.e. cummings' i.