Why We Keep Our Failures Close (A Fifty-Seventh Letter to a Young, Imaginary Visual Poet)

Delayed? Yes, that's the word. And, yes, once again.

But there are two kinds of delay, as I see it. One is procrastination or forgetting, the simple act of allowing something not to happen but for no reason beyond laziness, a lack of interest or will, a desire that doesn't fill a body with action. The other is a delay required by some fact of life, which could be a family tragedy or, simply, the need to complete other work.

The latter is my reason, but maybe it is the worse one. If so, I am sorry. There's something about making that pushes me to make, and usually the things I make are poems. Fortunately, I define "poem" quite broadly being uninterested in being held back because something is defined out of my range of activity, and I'd say you should do. Worrying about definition can be a useful effort, and knowing what you're doing or what to call what your doing can be something useful for an artist. But you don't need to be a critic. You don't need to know how your work falls within the streams of contemporary making, and its best not to worry about the significance of your work, because you'll never know. Someone will do that for you after your dead. If your lucky. For the unlucky many of us, that determination comes long before we die, and in the negative.

And I don't know why you should worry about your bad work, or even why you should hide it. Good work is always produced through the process of editing. You edit out the bad parts, you edit out the bad poems, and people in general edit out the bad careers. Some people argue, and I think it's good advice, that poets should show only their best work. This might give people the illusion that you produce at an exceptionally high quality all the time, but who could really believe that.

Take this old draft of a visual poem, actually the opening to a sequence that I never completed:


I don't think I've shown anyone this piece before, because it is such a mess. There is more wrong with it than right with it, because there's nothing right with it. My idea was to tell a vispoetic autobiography that used photographs from my family. And these photographs, of people who no longer exist though almost all are still alive, are all I still appreciate in this piece.

Although I tried to work an idea into something useful, I never did, but neither am I ashamed of this. I hate all my bad work--and I'm ironically good at producing it--but I keep them all. My poetics is one of production merely because production is the purest fact of creating, the inescapable necessity (meant in many ways), because production proves we're alive and creativity boils down only to the simple fact of our existence, evidence of that.

So I am not encouraging you to distribute all your bad work. I'm just saying don't be ashamed of it. Save it as evidence of the work your made yourself do. Each piece you create is evidence of some hardwon victory at creating something, evidence of something you learned, even if it was something you never want to do again. Don't try to publish each of these, but hold onto them. If nothing else, they can serve to control your vanity, which is something that all poets need, that all artists need.

Sometimes, we think we are special because we can make something others can't make. But vanity is a disease. It makes us complacent when we have to be resilient. And we become resilient by looking at our worst work every day.

So work on that, and save those deformed babies of yours. You won't find homes for them, but that is best for all of us.

ecr. l'inf.