Wednesday, 24 June 2020

Ava Hofmann : part three

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

Poetry is strictly inferior to every other medium in terms of cultivating formal capabilities (“getting good at writing badly”), access to an audience (“nobody reads poetry”), and opportunities for community-forming (“poets are loners and/or assholes”). But the no-good value of poetry is precisely in the fact that it is has a very low skill floor and is a largely insular activity. It can be the impossible screwed up space weirdo freaks can write into in order to gain something back from a planet which systematically denies them an identity, happiness, (self-)understanding, etc.

At a certain stage, poetry can also become a site for recasting forms which we associate with high-skill collaborative artistic activity into one of a similar kind of weirdo amateur art: visual poetry, sound poetry, interactive poetry, film poetry. What’s great about it is that poetry can become every other medium, but it’ll be still inflected with the fact that poetry is (thank god) amateur shit. Bad art utopia.

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