On the Poetic Life. — Small Night Projects

The poetic life? There’s two ways of looking at this: one, I believe most artists end up living the poetic life; two, most artists want more than the poetic life can ever promise--desire and conflict is a means to continuity, to living, to a life. What does the poetic life offer anyway? It is my contention that the poetic life is the life we ought to be living as artists, no matter how threadbare that life might be. And the ‘more’ beyond the poetic life will never live up to its billing. Let me tell you why. In recent years I’ve had several conversations with artists who have retreated from the art scene proper: Dublin. Some feel betrayed by the art scene as if it didn’t live up to its promise, a promise of the artist’s ideological making; others just got fed up of what they grew to perceive as the smell of bullshit. The art scene is something you come to understand and know over a period of time. If exposed to the centre for long enough you get to know its players and its patterns, its synaptic connections like a big fat tender brain. Overexposure stitches you into this fat tender brain. Tenderised, the studio life of an artist is crossed with the social life of the artist, so work and play become indivisible in an instrumental way of thinking and desiring about becoming an artist. In an environment lacking in resources and opportunities, it’s only common Darwinian, Marxist, Freudian sense that the same environment will not be lacking in opportunists. Artists will dismiss their networking capabilities offhand, but they have no real choice or insight into the hydraulics of their own desires and ambitions in an environment that is machined by professional sociability. The question is what is the alternative to the ice white casino at the centre with its redwoods and weeping willows and perennial weeds? Let me answer by telling you a story about a story. Last week I watched Jim Jarmusch’s film Paterson, wherein the poetic life is portrayed as symbiotic and synergistic with the workaday life. Paterson’s protagonist is a young bus driver named Paterson living in the city of Paterson. Duality plays out like a Superhero movie here as our poet/ bus driver heroically performs (without cape or spectacles) what David Foster Wallace calls the “day in/ day out” of ordinary life against the backdrop of what Adam Phillips calls the fantasy of the “unlived life”. His stay-at-home wife paints her house and clothes. She is a black and white reincarnation of another poet, Hilda Doolittle, who inspired William Carlos Williams, yet another poet, who wrote an epic poem titled, you guessed it, Paterson. She dreams about having kids (twins!), being a famous country and western singer, and seeing Paterson’s poetry read by the world. She’s more the mother figure of a slow-cooked son who never left home, or the retrograde portrait of the good wife. I find the scenario comforting, like back in the womb of home sweet home—I’m a mama’s boy it seems. Their world seems smothered as I write it down here, but it’s not. A temporal whole opens up in their world when we are proffered a glimpse of a photograph of Paterson as a Marine on the couple’s bedside table in uniform in the opening sequence, which nudges us to speculate on or melodramatize a history just out of frame. The poet/ bus driver combo could never have come fully formed into this world. Something must have made Paterson the way he is to notice and pen down the minutiae of life and memory in such precious throwaway detail. PTSD from being a Marine is as good a reason as any. Poetry comes from trauma that shakes words loose from their regimental purpose. The fact is, the photograph of the Marine sits pride of place beside the couple’s love and intimacy every morning and night for the seven days of the film. Their life is normal: bad dinners, good cupcakes, walking the dog, having a pint, waking up together, dreaming of the future, the silent solitude of being a bus driver surrounded by people but not obliged to perform, against the loose ends of domesticity—there’s a feminist critique in there <<both ways>> but I’m not going there. Through a neoliberal lens you would call their life stair-less, contributing nothing outside their own bungalow’d ambition. Thing is, the lovely couple seem contented happy: her with a smartphone and projects that stave off the vertigo of freetime in the home; him with his secret notebook and simple lunchbox. They are artists: one reaching out, the other in retreat—a balancing act: equilibrium. The repeated references to William Carlos Williams in Paterson is important here; a poet (according to Linda Welshimer) “willing to live the kind of rushed existence that would be necessary, crowding two full lifetimes into one... learning from the first and then understanding through the second”. William Carlos Williams was a doctor for 40-odd years. What’s poetic about being a doctor or a bus driver if (in your secret journal) you are a poet/ doctor or poet/ bus driver? It is the dual life that is poetic, one “rushing” into the other, one public, one under-the-arm private, both in plain sight if you are willing to acknowledge the possibility of normalcy being the seedbed of something poetic, something more, as the curious and empathetic Chinese man (and poet) does in the penultimate scene of the film, where we find Paterson wallowing in the trauma of her dog eating his journal with all that poetry that has infused the seven days of the film. It’s poetic to this fellow poet that this young man sits here, on this bench, kindred souls, lost in thought monitoring the mundane for something extra. This is poetic: taking silent stock of last night, this morning, this life, so a line can be bled from the day. It’s as if poetry—New York School poetry á la Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery—is nobler than the everyday, even though contingent on the everyday. The poet’s job is to stroke the knot that is the present. I like Howard Nemerov’s definition of poetry: “Poetry is the other way of using language. Perhaps in some hypothetical beginning of things it was the only way of using language or simply was language tout court, prose being the derivative and younger rival.” The language we speak today is not art speak, it’s institutionalised speak, something that Derrida’s Deconstruction was hoping to undermine down to the molecular paradoxes and frailties of language. I summon up the Texan painter Forrest Bess when I think about the poetic life. A fisherman by day, a painter of visions by night. But unlike Paterson—who is a unique case for some unique reason—Bess wanted more than the poetic life could give as he simultaneously dropped the hand on the New York art scene. Bess was conflicted for a purpose beyond painting, beyond professionalism, beyond the good life. Today you are an enigma if you retreat from the artworld—Martin Herbert wrote a book, Tell Them I said No, on enigmatic artists who withdrew from the artworld. On the ground the poetic life is about just getting by, threadbare, once removed from the world, although touching it, bringing us a little closer to it at the same time. Everything promises more. The artistic life is designated as an alternative life to the mainstream life. The poetic life, as portrayed in Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, reinforces the values inherent in fostering the alternative life of the artist, free from the constraints, conditioning, and self-censorship of instrumental professionalism. Does the artist go underground (or embrace a poetic life above ground) as Marcel Duchamp called on the future artist to go in the 1960s, or does the artist keep on knock-knock knocking on the joke door of the art institution? Retreat!