On
Writing
Gregory
Betts
I
like the messy body; not interested in only clean; the illusion of perfection.
Mistakes embody the process of bodies. We slop, we spill, we tumble – and
through an arduous process, we enable small moments of grace. The kind of poetry
that I’m interested in – avant/conceptual/experimental/&etc art and poetry
– is filled with attempts to highlight the importance of process – by which is
often meant an acceptance of the mistake.
Kenny
Goldsmith, who runs Ubu.com, in his book Soliloquy
includes in the transcript a conversation where he reveals that he really
doesn’t understand who Pere Ubu is or what he’s about. What astonishing
generosity, honesty to include such a moment without editing it out. Ubu was a
shithead, a guy lost in his own illusions. Was Goldsmith enacting Ubu by including
his mistake, becoming late 20th century’s ubu roi, or offering a
wink to the observant? It’s that kind of elegance that I’m interested in with
mistakes – where you reveal inverted, potential truths through errors,
something perhaps inadvertently beautiful; discovering new terrain through
mistakes.
Found
poetry, appropriative writing, plunderverse, &etc, is laden with the rare
mixture of innocent text with insight. Such unintentional poetry is, in fact, essential
to teaching and to learning, but making mistakes is only a preliminary step in
the process. There’s a reason the army of teachers out there spend so much time
carefully correcting the mistakes in every essay, even when they know that many
of the students will never even glance at those comments. We do it because error
is at the heart of our enterprise, the moment’s chance to change the course of
things to come: the inverted potential of the real lives of our students. But
we should not be afraid of or disgusted by those errors – we have to attend to
them, think about them more productively, exhaustively. Personally, I harvest
them, revel in their spectacular vistas.
In This is Importance, I wanted to
highlight the importance of the error –– not only because they are hilarious,
but because they offer a glimpse into the process of teaching and learning,
alongside rare glimpses of inadvertent beauty in student writing. In my
classroom, in my poetry, I focus on the mistakes because I cherish the painful
process of learning. My favourite mistakes are the ones that strive towards
something lofty and often clichéd only to inadvertently arrive at a much more
convincing insight. I don’t mean the ones where the language has no clue what it
is revealing, and sit empty vestibules of incoherent letters. Those aren’t
particularly interesting to me. I mean, the ones where the particular wording
creates another possible truth that resonates. From that book: “Poetic form is
how you tell a poem from nothing”.
A
poetry from such mistakes is, to misparaphrase Robert Duncan, like a
drug-addled addict suddenly happy and grandiose with a gladness to private
meaningless pleasures, to profundities because they were depths, to ecstasies
because they were heights—mere dimensions. A poet on writing.
Gregory Betts lives in St. Catharines,
Ontario. His most recent books include This is Importance (Wolsak & Wynn
2013), a book of student errors on Canadian literature, and Avant Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations (UTP 2013). His next book is
Boycott, forthcoming from Make Now Press.
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