Jack Burns Lives!

Writing can be so frustrating. It’s difficult to produce quality material (I know as I’ve yet to do so), and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find anything worth reading.

Frankly, I believe American writing is more or less in the ditch.

From published novels to poetry, most of what I’m seeing of late is rather mundane. Are there any prominent writers taking the same sort of radical approaches to writing as leading painters and sculptors? Even the “street level” stuff (often better than things published) I hear in local coffee shops or read in literary reviews leaves me feeling unfulfilled.

I have a stack of books on my bed table, mostly lighter reading I enjoy before I go to bed. On the dining room table is the heavy duty stuff, books that really demand careful attention, like David Graeber’s most recent book, Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire . You can’t read a book like that in bed, because you’ll be asleep within minutes. But more often than not, I find myself struggling to finish any of them. Few writers command my attention like Abbey, Twain, Jeffers or Welch. I flirted with Cormac McCarthy and tried desperately to like him, but it wasn’t meant to be. His prose is unique but often strikes me as scattered and hard to follow. Perhaps it’s just me, and I don’t have the intellect to grasp what he’s doing since so many others have elevated him to the highest perch in American writing. Sherman Alexie is good, a unique stylist that will make you laugh with his easy flowing, provocative writing style. Flight is one of his best. But all in all, the representative writing of the membership of the American Academy of Arts and Letters strikes me as bland.

Or, you might end up with the other extreme, a writer that tries so desperately to be unique they end up producing little more than garbled mush and rubbish.

Orion Magazine occasionally publishes some strong pieces, but go to its poetry section. It’s usually about as interesting as the ramblings of the Venerable Bede. Just the same old boring, soft shoe diction languishing for originality. Every time I read one of those poems I feel like I’ve read a hundred just like it.

Say something people! Say something profound with an original score. Don’t be so damn boring with all your sweetness about bees, apricots, the sacred soil and where thy feet hath trod. Lew Welch said if you want to write good poetry you need to get your ass out into the streets and learn the language. Hear what people say and how they say it in the real world, not some imaginary world you’ve concocted within your own mind. That approach ultimately produces little more than the ornamental spittle I too often read in literary magazines.

Write about what happened at the newsstand. Tell us what you heard on the subway. Use the language you heard at the bus stop. Tell us about the old lady dying without health insurance or the jobless father that’s thinking about blowing his brains out. And tell us the good stories too, just make it interesting. Write about kids hooping it up in North Memphis. Be brutally real and don’t worry so much about rules and syntax. Writing isn’t about grammar; it’s about conveying feeling and creating emotion. It’s about truth and saying something important.

Wilderness and outdoor writing is another big yawner these days. I rarely give it a second thought. Frankly, I can’t see what anyone sees in Craig Childs. Is that the best we’ve got? Terry Tempest Williams? Boring.

I agree with Abbey in that the primary duty of the writer is to tell the plain truth, regardless of how ugly and or how uncomfortable it may be. But I also think we need to move beyond that basic premise and find more interesting ways to tell the truth. Robert Motherwell, when writing about his friend, the famous painter Jackson Pollock, stated what Pollock really showed us is that “there really are no rules and that only when a man really asserts his identity, even if to the point of convulsion, does his medium rise to the character of style.”

Most of my own writing has been pretty bland and ordinary. It’s nothing I’m particularly proud of, although I have been experimenting with some things I post on another site. Much of it is in no man’s land, stuck between poetry and prose, some flash fiction, but at least I’m trying. And it sure as hell beats sitting in front of the television.

So, I’m headed in a new direction. I’m going out there even further on the edge just to see what happens. Sure, it might all be shit, but at least I won’t be producing the same old worn out shit currently filling the shelves. I’m going to devote more of my attention to “the other stuff,” and try to formulate more interesting ways to say what I believe needs to be said.

For at least the past two decades, pen wielding artists have left it up to the fine arts crowd to do our work, and that needs to change.

Back to the drawing board….