When fellow workshoppers tell you to delete or change references that will "date" a piece.
First of all, if the piece gets published, it's going to come to readers in the context of a dated periodical or book. How often do we read something without having a vague idea of when it was written and published? Secondly, if we should be so lucky as to have our work read by future generations, then readers will likely have a grasp on when we were writing. By then you're "famous." Thirdly, even if we don't use timely brand names, popular slang and so on, our constructions and our vocabulary and our topical interests will betray us anyway. One can't speak without dating oneself. And so what? Shakespeare sounds pretty dated these days, but we're still reading him (and watching him at the movies). The writing of a given generation always has its markers. That doesn't make it a time bomb counting down to its own obsolescence.
October 22, 2008
Another workshoppism I don't get:
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6 comments:
As a p.s., I'll name one workshop cliche I kind of get with: "What's at stake here?" Workshoppy or no, I think it's kind of true that most poems fail not via their spectacular badness but because they just don't matter one way or the other.
I kind of get this one. I think what people really mean is, if you’re going to use a topical reference unique to your time period, or your demographic, or you’re pulling one from the past to date a particular piece you’re writing as being from the past, go one step further, and “illustrate” what you mean by it, so your piece of writing will “stand the test of time” (another over-worked phrase!).
What I mean by all that, is, that a writer can’t always assume the reader is familiar with your topical reference, or that, even if they are, they get the same meaning out of it as you do, or will perceive your particular take on the icon or image as it pertains to your piece. To take a simple example, if you reference Marilyn Monroe, you could also say, that curvaceous blonde with the pursed-lip smile hiding a fragility, or, that bawdy circus clown with the fly-away dress and the piped-in heat, so that both now and 200 years from now, the description will mean as much, if not more, than the person’s name.
Another example: He’s Folgers over Starbucks. It could be taken to mean, he’s cheap, but the writer might mean this: He’s down to earth over pretentious. The concept might require the writer to supply a direct explanation, or explanation by context, so any reader will comprehend the author’s intent, now or 200 years from now, when the brand names may be meaningless.
On the other hand, I agree, we need to express the time we live in, or our collective writing becomes homogenized and useless. Still, I think it’s possible to write in our own time, and make it comprehensible to the future. As in all things, it’s a “delicate balance” (another tried, but true cliché).
Yeah, I don't think Folgers necessarily needs to be in a poem or story ... if something like that is just distracting and pointlessly overspecific. But then, the problem with the detail is not that it dates the piece, but that it's pointlessly overspecific (the same would be true if you wrote "mediocre brand-name coffee" instead of just "coffee" when the type/quality of the coffee has no bearing on anything). I can think of lots of writing in which the specific names are perfect and add something (the brands in White Noise, Lana Turner in that Frank O'Hara poem...)
This is the reason I love Fredrick Barthelme, but also the reason I can't get many people to agree with me. You either love this approach or hate it.
Oh Dear, all these posts are giving me MFA fear. I mean, more MFA fear than I already had. I like specific, interesting words, and if specific, interesting words "date" a piece, then great! When someone says "timeless" and "universal," I get suspicious.
I just read this quote attributed to Anne Boyer which seems apropos:
"It seems like often I come across poetry that has excluded all material that does not conform to the safest set of notions about what poetic material is, so much so that it feels like patent dishonesty -- like the world we [live in] is being "covered up" by the poets who can't bear to look at it, or who are somehow weirdly protected from it (but surely they've encountered plastic? and billboards? and the internet?). I'm always so grateful to read poetry that refuses to go along with that game."
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