on "urgency" & "relevance"
& round-up
Happy Wednesday, all. If it seems like I keep breaking my posting schedule, it’s because I am. If you’re sick of my name in your inbox, please feel free to unsubscribe—I hate to be a bother.
&, for those who are interested, here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
A submission opportunity
New work out
New subscriptions
What I’m reading
On urgency & relevance
Tweets
Housekeeping:
The West Review is set to come out in less than a month (!!!), but so far we’ve only accepted a few poems for inclusion.
If you think your work might be a good fit: please submit. Pay is $10/poem.
If you submitted and haven’t heard back yet: please be patient with me! The decision will come.
I have a poem out in SoFloPoJo (South Florida Poetry Journal) this week.
There’s a recording of me reading it on their website (which always makes me a bit nervous), or you can read the text of the poem here:
SUNDOWN AGAIN, and I’m walking through the woods, orange light slanting between pines, my own shadow hurling itself against a tree trunk. I’m making my way home again, taking the shortcut, the scent of nettles pungent in the August heat. Behind me, the world dissolves: distant memory of the meadow, lying in clover, gnats storming the upending air. I think back to last summer: browning fields, skin flaking off my shoulders like paint, those days I wouldn’t let myself go near the lake, knowing again I’d try to drown. I dodge the poison oak snaking onto the trail, its leaves spun with shine. Far above the treetops, a bird caws, and I ache for its wings, a better view of this quilted land: the pines, the fields of kale, all the barn roofs warped with age. I wonder what it’s like: to be so forgotten, to decay, walls crawling with weeds. Like any girl who values survival, I wonder what it would be like: to lie here for eternity, bruised limbs lost under this waning light, my body nothing among this clutter of trees.
I have some art out this week in Neon Door:
Here’s my lil artist statement:
These collages—mixed-media that features found photos, Sharpie, and printed text—focus on the intersections: of poetry and art, of paint and photography, and of sexuality and ecology. The latter is consistent throughout all my work, which looks at how landscape and sexuality become combined, and how both are vital to each work’s ethos and the speaker’s act of identity- and meaning-making. The five collages included here seek to articulate certain feelings through words and then illustrate these feelings through visual art, with figures, colors, and backgrounds that engender a specific mood within viewers. Although they differ in their colors and style, they all are consistent in their exploration of the idea of "longing"—whether that be for the past, for a beloved, for hope, or even for eternal youth. I think back to a line I recently read by poet Kate Greenstreet: "All art arises from longing." It’s a generalization but—at least in the case of these works—one that rings true.
& someone shared an old poem of mine recently, which was really sweet:
Subscriptions
are now live on my website.
There are two options:
A book subscription, which gets you a book in the mail monthly for $15/month. (US only.)
A snail mail subscription, which gets you an envelope filled with broadsides, stickers, zines, art, and/or lil letters, sent to your IRL mailbox every month. (With this one, there is an option for international orders, too.)
What I read last week:
On “““““urgency”””””:
I have a lot to say about this topic but won’t say much. Only this: your work is worthwhile & meaningful & essential & etc. even if an editor/publisher deems it “not urgent” or “necessary” enough. Your art matters even if it doesn’t engage explicitly with global issues or identity politics.
In any case, other writers believe this, too, and articulate their thoughts on the subject a lot better than I ever could.
In Garth Greenwell’s essay “Making Meaning: Against Relevance in Art,” he writes:
Artists feel the anxiety of relevance during every season of fellowship applications, those rituals of supplication, when we have to make a case for ourselves in a way that feels entirely foreign, for me at least, to the real motivations of art. Why is this the right project for this moment? If I had a question like that on my mind as I tried to make art, I would never write another word.
Then, citing the Oxford English Dictionary, he notes that the word “relevant,” in recent years, has adopted an entirely new definition:
Something no longer had to be relevant to something or someone in particular; it could simply be, in a vague, hovering way, relevant. “Appropriate or applicable in the (esp. current) context or circumstance,” was the OED’s definition for this new usage; and then, tautologically, “having social, political, etc. relevance.”
Then, Casey Plett, in an essay responding to Greenwell’s, writes:
I see such pressure as particularly weighing on artists from marginalized populations (often the very populations such questions of relevancy are intended to uplift). It’s not unique to just the artists shooting for fellowships and grants either—I hear such anxieties all the time, for example, from my beginning creative writing students: Writers who worry their work is not “important,” that it’s “silly,” that perhaps it doesn’t “mean anything.”
and adds:
Now, certainly, it’s a needed corrective for the funders and power-brokers of art to support marginalized artists who have historically have been left out. But I often find myself wishing there was room to do that while encouraging the whimsy and murkiness that accompanies artistic process; the time to allow the expansion of the mystery.
Artist residencies can be the perfect places to enable creative people to explore such mysteries, though said residencies would do well to avoid front-loading the pressure on artists to anticipate the outcomes. As these sanctuaries wrestle with goals of equity, intersectionality, and how to better steward resources, I would suggest that, as counterintuitive as it might seem, easing the requirement for artists to detail the relevancy of their intended projects is actually key to achieving said goals.
and later continues:
[Certain books’] blurbs are also the kind of language I thought of while reading Greenwell’s essay: “Why is this the right project for this moment?” Answering that question for my own work, I could make up an answer to please funders, but the true answer in my gut is always: How should I know if this is the “right project” for “this moment”? I don’t know if the book I’m writing will make the world a better place. I don’t know if it will change anyone’s mind. I’m not writing to do that. What I’d like to tell them is, “Your fellowship/residency/funding will allow the space for the project to expand. What that’s going to look like, I can only tell you once it’s over.
and then adds:
The idea of universality is nothing more than a maneuver whereby a privileged social position—which is often the position of straightness, whiteness, and maleness—secures its own default status, and therefore its immunity from self-awareness and critique. I can’t help feeling that the current idea of “relevance” recapitulates some of the disturbing features of “universality” in the way my literature professors once applied the term.
It can feel so impossible to be an artist/writer pursuing your craft—in a way that you know is meaningful, even if it’s niche-y or “apolitical” or about, like, love or the beauty of flowers—with journals & presses & editors concerned, above everything, about potential profits & what kind of art will be most monetarily successful.
I have had friends whose books have been rejected from renowned presses because they “lacked urgency,” didn’t feel “necessary” “for our time.” My own work has likely been rejected for the very same reasons.
Other times, a piece might not be rejected per se but, rather, redirected & thus forcing the writer to abandon their original vision. Greenwell has experienced that:
I can still remember the shudder I felt in early 2017 when, after expressing my desire to review a newly translated European novel, an editor asked me to find “a Trump angle” to make the book relevant to his magazine’s readers. There’s something demeaning about approaching art from a predetermined angle, all the more so when that angle is determined by our current president.
Something Greenwell wrote that I related to:
I often find myself perusing the shelves at Prairie Lights, a bookstore in Iowa City, where I live, reading the jacket copy of a recent release, sighing with friends that we don’t have time for another story about x or y, and setting it back on the shelf unopened. Often these judgments are framed as jokes, though they are half in earnest. They make me laugh sometimes; they also make me worry. The desire to invert a structure of injustice—to inflict on those we take to be the bearers of privilege the disregard they have inflicted on others—is one I very much understand, one I feel in myself. But it is always ethically suspect to speak of any human experience as irrelevant to our common human experience; it is always, let me go further, an act of something like violence. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu describes what he calls the law of the conservation of violence: that groups subjected to violence will seek to inflict that violence on others, to pass it along. This is what we’re doing when we dismiss the relevance of other stories—the relevance, therefore, of other lives—and suggest that the aesthetic value of a human experience, such as straight-male desire, is exhaustible.
& to the editors, presses, & TPTB, embody this wisdom from Greenwell:
It seems to me that either we believe that all human experience is valuable, that any life has the potential to reveal something true for every life—a universality achieved not through the effacement of difference but through devotion to it—or we don’t. I want to encourage the proliferation of voices and stories, not their repression.
Tweets:
-Despy Boutris