What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?
The fact that for over a decade I’ve been cultivating skills that are very unlikely to bring me anything resembling financial security and that I’ve also forgotten to develop any other marketable skills.
Pretending like “oh, it’s so hard to make poems” seems disingenuous to me, like I’m trying to act like my artmaking is laborious (and therefore confer value onto it). Sure, you’ll always encounter creative problems and struggles, but part of the joy of writing (and all art) is to kind of climb into that creative trouble and climb back out of it again.
Every real time I’ve thought about giving up writing or have had real existential crises over my work were because we live under an economic system which despises human life—and therefore, also, despises art. If I wasn’t worrying about the fact that I feel like I have no future or whatever I’d be making more work and it would be a whole lot riskier and a whole lot better than the work I’m making now.
Showing posts with label Ava Hofmann. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ava Hofmann. Show all posts
Wednesday, 8 July 2020
Wednesday, 1 July 2020
Ava Hofmann : part four
How important is music to your poetry?
You know, I’ve tried to play around with ‘musical-ness’ and sound in my poetry before, but it never quite works out for me. I think there’s this lie as poets we’ve been led to believe that poetry is musical in some sense, when I think really there’s something more concretely visual about it—the synesthetic process of interpreting shapes into words, shapes into rhythms, pauses, etc. The work of my poetry is to create the illusion of an intimate music in the guts of what is actually a pretty impersonal visual art.
You know, I’ve tried to play around with ‘musical-ness’ and sound in my poetry before, but it never quite works out for me. I think there’s this lie as poets we’ve been led to believe that poetry is musical in some sense, when I think really there’s something more concretely visual about it—the synesthetic process of interpreting shapes into words, shapes into rhythms, pauses, etc. The work of my poetry is to create the illusion of an intimate music in the guts of what is actually a pretty impersonal visual art.
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.
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.
Wednesday, 17 June 2020
Ava Hofmann : part two
Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?
I started writing poetry in high school, like 10 years ago, so there’s inevitably going to be a lot of change between where I started and where I began. I grew up in a semi-rural small-town environment in a cult-y family where access to poetry wasn’t all that widespread. My first encounter with anything like experimental poetry was the work of e. e. cummings, which is not really all that experimental (nor am I necessarily still a big fan of his work). I think, at the very least, an interest in “weird shit” has remained from that time.
What has changed the most has been, I guess, the actual content of my work. When I started writing poetry, I was still religious. I wrote a lot of strange poems about god and Christianity, and in general I just tried to have kind of a weird sensibility about faith back then. Partly because I wanted to be artsy or whatever, but also because I was an extremely closeted person who couldn’t really acknowledge the fact that she was really a trans girl. I ended up writing poems about like, Christ’s piss being a holy relic, being erotically beaten up by a genderbent Jesus, or poems where I would just call myself a nun without any kind of accounting for my gender. And I was writing these poems both as a kind of sincere sacrament, but I think also as a place to explore the things I wanted to explore, stuff that was kind of taboo in my conservative environment—like my own transness. My poetry was a pathway out.
Eventually, I had started to write less about Christianity, and more about other stuff I cared about, like communism and history and infrastructure. But when I finally figured out religion wasn’t for me and I came out and started transitioning, what my poetry was really about had to change a lot. It was kind of if the form and the content of ways I had been writing finally clicked; form became an accounting of transness, and my transness became an accounting of form. I could really let loose with weird and visual stuff because I finally had a personal way of being in the world that aligned with it.
I started writing poetry in high school, like 10 years ago, so there’s inevitably going to be a lot of change between where I started and where I began. I grew up in a semi-rural small-town environment in a cult-y family where access to poetry wasn’t all that widespread. My first encounter with anything like experimental poetry was the work of e. e. cummings, which is not really all that experimental (nor am I necessarily still a big fan of his work). I think, at the very least, an interest in “weird shit” has remained from that time.
What has changed the most has been, I guess, the actual content of my work. When I started writing poetry, I was still religious. I wrote a lot of strange poems about god and Christianity, and in general I just tried to have kind of a weird sensibility about faith back then. Partly because I wanted to be artsy or whatever, but also because I was an extremely closeted person who couldn’t really acknowledge the fact that she was really a trans girl. I ended up writing poems about like, Christ’s piss being a holy relic, being erotically beaten up by a genderbent Jesus, or poems where I would just call myself a nun without any kind of accounting for my gender. And I was writing these poems both as a kind of sincere sacrament, but I think also as a place to explore the things I wanted to explore, stuff that was kind of taboo in my conservative environment—like my own transness. My poetry was a pathway out.
Eventually, I had started to write less about Christianity, and more about other stuff I cared about, like communism and history and infrastructure. But when I finally figured out religion wasn’t for me and I came out and started transitioning, what my poetry was really about had to change a lot. It was kind of if the form and the content of ways I had been writing finally clicked; form became an accounting of transness, and my transness became an accounting of form. I could really let loose with weird and visual stuff because I finally had a personal way of being in the world that aligned with it.
Wednesday, 10 June 2020
Ava Hofmann : part one
How do you know when a poem is finished?
Nowadays, I look at it visually on the page. There’s a really great visual art term known as horror vacui, which represents a tendency to not want to leave blank spaces in one’s work. In the moment of writing, I’m a fretful maximalist by nature; I want to be generous with my writing, provide as much of it as possible to a reader in a kaleidoscopic whirlwind. So, as a poem-architect, I have to be stingy; I need small portion sizes in order not to die from exhaustion (or overwhelm the reader too much). Thus, I turn to constraint. Like a visual artist, I choose size of my canvas before I even start to write. “Your poems in this series can only fit in a 3-inch-by-3-inch square.” “Your poems can only be 3 words long.” “You only have 5 seconds to write poem.” Etc.
An alternate answer is when it stops being a poem.
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