I think any communication to the polity constitutes, by definition, a political act, whether that’s publishing an essay or performing a poem out loud for an audience, regardless of its content. So I think there’s a politics inherent in, and visible in, all of my writing, regardless of what form it takes. That’s true of my father’s work as well. But not all of his writing or mine is specifically issue-oriented. […]
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Follow me on Mastodon:
@adcoleman@hcommons.social
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Even as a critic writing closely reasoned and sometimes scholarly pieces, or when producing what some now call “cultural journalism,” or as an occasional polemicist, I write for the ear as much as for the eye. Always. I hear all my writing as speech. If it doesn’t sound right when spoken aloud, I revise until it does. […] [T]though I keenly appreciated the honor of finding myself among the select few admitted to the SF State program [in creative writing], I didn’t really enjoy the experience, or thrive in that hothouse environment. I hated feeling those other people’s fingerprints all over my work in progress. … [E]ven today I rarely show work in progress, in any form, to anyone — not even my editors. […] One reason I feel free not to let any of this worry me is that I have no affiliations or allegiances within the poetry world, thus no image of myself as a poet of this or that tendency, nothing to maintain in anyone else’s eyes or my own except a level of quality to my output. […] |
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Cabin Fever 2018: Bits & Pieces (b)
Among the enduring mysteries of my professional life (e.g., How do you make a decent living at this? and Who’s the good critic?) I have counted what seemed to me the adamant refusal of French scholars to use my chosen nom de plume, substituting instead my first and sometimes second names, one or another of them (or both) possibly misspelled. […]