I have been lax in celebrating William Blake’s birthday, which passed by recently, on Nov. 28th. A Londoner almost all of his life, he was born in 1757 and died in 1827, just short of his 70th birthday. He’s best known for The Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and within that, the poem “The Tyger,” and also for an excerpt from his long poem Milton a Poem which was set to music by Hubert Parry in a piece called “Jerusalem” (And did those feet…), a composition used as a school song for many schools around the world also famously covered by Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Selections from “Auguries of Innocence” are found in the Tomb Raider movies, his art in the Hannibal Lecter movies, and his poems are probably used for lyrics by contemporary musicians more than any other poet from any time. There are book-length lists of Blake poems set to music.
I didn’t learn about Blake in school, however — I learned of him when I heard the song “William Blake,” which was written by Terry Scott Taylor for the band Daniel Amos on their Vox Humana album. Hearing that song was enough to get me to rush to — remember these? — a B. Dalton Bookseller, where I picked up a copy of the Viking Portable Blake. That started me on a journey that took me through graduate school, a dissertation, my first book, and then two Rock and Romanticism books. But it was all about music and literature from the beginning, not just the stuff they make you read in school, as it was for Blake himself, who originally sang many of those poems at dinner parties to his own original musical compositions. He was said to have a good singing voice, and scholars of music notated his compositions at the time, though those are lost to us now. Roy Starling was my first instructor in Romanticism, and he made Romantic poetry come alive for me, as he did all the literature he taught to all of his students at the college and high school levels.
I chose Blake because I wanted a subject of study that I could attend to for twenty years without getting bored, and he has not disappointed. In addition to my own writing about Blake, I was also privileged to work with Michael Phillips on three occasions for Blake printmaking demonstrations, one of these resulting in an exhibit at Rollins College and another in an exhibit curated by Lee Fearnside that consisted of contemporary artists inspired by Blake alongside Phillips’s own reproductions of Blake’s work through his reproduction of his printmaking methods.
And Blake has informed and inspired my own creative work — following in his footsteps I’m working on my own reworking of Milton’s Paradise Lost as a steampunk western as well as assorted collections of my own poetry. We will see where it all leads, but I remain grateful for what Blake has meant to me.
I should end this with Blake’s own words…
And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon Englands mountains green: And was the holy Lamb of God, On Englands pleasant pastures seen!
And did the Countenance Divine, Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my Bow of burning gold: Bring me my arrows of desire: Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold! Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand: Till we have built Jerusalem, In Englands green & pleasant Land.
First, Writing for College and Beyondis now out and desk and review copies are available. Check out the book site, and if you’re a first-year writing instructor and would like a review or desk copy, or would like to review it for your journal, email me.
Next, Reading as Democracy in Crisis: Interpretation, Theory, Historywas published in April 2019. Consider ordering it for your library, for yourself, or for review in your journal. This edited anthology explores how crises in democracy during different historical periods influenced the development of different theories or methods of interpreting written works.
Finally, I’m happy to report that David Bowie and Romanticism: The Chameleon Poet and the Changeling Self is now under contract, and Women in Rock/Women in Literature: The Emancipation of Female Will is under consideration with a publisher.
Rock and Romanticism: scholarship with a soundtrack. Yes, I have two anthologies with the main title Rock and Romanticism. The first was published early February 2018 by Lexington Books, and was focused on Blake and Wordsworth and, very generally, the genre of classic rock.
This second book is Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming late May 2018) and is focused just where the title implies: on the gothic or “dark Romanticism” as it is sometimes called and on its musical counterparts in rock. The first book states a thesis about the relationship between rock and roll and Romanticism. This book restates that thesis and then extends it to different genres of music and literature.
This page provides chapter descriptions and a lot more. If you liked the first book, you’ll like this one too: those interested in one really need to get both. If you’re drawn to this project, please consider requesting that your libraries order it. A more formal description of the project follows.
Because I’ve recently published two edited anthologies with the same top title, I’ve created this video explaining the origin of these books and the differences between the two:
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The edited anthology Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms(Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) is now available for preorder on the publisher’s website and will ship in late May 2018. I’m providing information here for potential readers, reviewers, and college and university librarians who may be interested in this book. If you wish to review this anthology for your publication, please contact James Rovira at jamesrovira@gmail.com with your name, credentials, and the name of the publication for which you wish to review this work.
But I’d like to provide a bit of personal history before I get into details about the book: my introduction to English Romanticism (my first way in to the vast labyrinth that is “Romanticism”) occurred in two stages. First, through the song “William Blake” on the Daniel Amos album Vox Humana (1984). That song made me run to the local B. Dalton Booksellers (remember those?) to pick up a copy of The Viking Portable William Blake.
Next, when my undergraduate English Romantics professor at Rollins College, Dr. Roy Starling, wanted to explain to his students what the publication of Lyrical Ballads meant to the 1790s, he compared it to this moment in rock history, the moment when Bob Dylan the folk singer plugged in and went electric:
And that was how I first understood Romanticism as a literary phenomenon. Thank you, Dr. Starling. In both cases, my way in to Romanticism was rock music from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms explores the relationships among the musical genres of post-punk, goth, and metal and seventeenth- to nineteenth-century American and European Romanticisms in their literary, artistic, and musical expressions. It argues that these contemporary forms of music are not only influenced by but are an expression of Romanticism continuous with their seventeenth- through nineteenth-century influences. Figures such as Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Friedrich, Schlegel, Beethoven, and Hoffman are brought alongside the musical and visual aesthetics of the Rolling Stones, the New Romantics, the Pretenders, Joy Division, Nick Cave, Tom Verlaine, emo, Eminem, My Dying Bride, and Norwegian black metal to explore the ways that Romanticism continues into the present in its many varying forms and expressions. Book details:
Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms ~James Rovira, ed. ~ Hardcover ISBN 978-3-319-72687-8 ~eBook ISBN 978-3-319-72688-5 ~ DOI10.1007/978-3-319-72688-5 ~ pp. 330 ~ hardcover: $109.00 (£80.00); ebook: $84.99 (£63.99). This collection is part of the series Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, P. Lumsden and M. Katz Montiel, editors.
Chapters are listed below. Many and profuse thanks M. Katz Montiel for being a great series editor (he made every chapter better), to Palgrave Macmillan’s editorial team, and to Dr. Mark McCutcheon (see the Nick Cave chapter description) for his work assembling these playlists. After the Preface and Introduction, songs are arranged in the order in which they appear in the chapter.
I’ve created iTunes playlists for each chapter that are linked within chapter descriptions. Also check out the iTunes Master Playlist for this anthology that combines all available songs (over 200) and the Spotify Master Playlist.
Preface and Introduction: “Theorizing Rock/Historicizing Romanticism” James Rovira. Check out his iTunes profile.
Chapter summary
James Rovira’s Preface (pp. vii-ix) and Introduction (pp. 1-25) to Rock and Romanticism describe the origins of this project, the difficulty in defining the term “Romanticism” in reference to British literature from Byron to the present, how Sayre and Löwy’s Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity helps address these problems in a way supportive of this project, and the links between rock and Romanticism as they have surfaced in scholarship and other writing since the 1960s. His discussion then continues into an examination of the relationship between Gothic and Romantic literature, which leads to the claim that John Milton was not just a source of inspiration for English Romantic poets but was himself the first English Romantic poet (thus, “seventeenth- through nineteenth-century” Romanticisms referenced above rather than just “eighteenth- and nineteenth-century”). After that, Rovira provides chapter summaries. Within these chapter summaries, he engages some of the issues related to the female Gothic as they arise in chapter discussions.
Music (this playlist excludes mention of artists or songs discussed in other chapters)
“Empathy for the Devil: The Origins of Mick Jagger’s Devil in John Milton’s London” (pp. 27-44) by Evan LaBuzetta, Ph.D., Cambridge University. Independent scholar, founder of Writling Language Consultants.
Chapter summary
Evan LaBuzetta’s “Empathy for the Devil: The Origins of Mick Jagger’s Devil in John Milton’s London” analyzes the political discourse and outlines the discursive practices that influenced John Milton in his development of the character of Satan in Paradise Lost. Milton’s Satan was reinterpreted by the Romantics and later appropriated by Mick Jagger in “Sympathy for the Devil.” According to LaBuzetta, the rise of personal interpretation of Scripture in an era of vicious conflict led various combatants in the English Civil Wars to identify their domestic opponents with Satan. In pamphlets, writers could insist on their opponents’ Satanic origins regardless of outward appearance—because Satan can transform himself into an “angel of light”—while at the same time positing their own demonization as a sign of the righteousness of their cause. Through the English Civil Wars, rebellion against civil authority came to be seen as different than rebellion against God, establishing a “paradox of individual authority” by the time of Milton’s writing. Once God is dethroned as a “self-justifying principle,” a writer like Shelley could thrill to the active, virile, self-confident aspects of Satan’s character and declare that Milton’s Satan is far preferable to Milton’s God. Milton anthropomorphized Satan, and later readers came to see him in personal, non-religious terms: as a heroic individual striving against a tyrannical, self-imposing force, one with whom readers or rock fans could empathize.
“‘Bliss was it in that shirt to be alive’: Connecting Romanticism and New Romanticism Through Dress” (pp. 45-59) by Emily Bernhard Jackson, Lecturer, University of Exeter.
Chapter summary
Skipping ahead about ten years after the Stones expressed sympathy for the devil, Emily Bernhard-Jackson’s “The Semiotics of the Ruffled Shirt: Connecting Romanticism and New Romanticism” shifts focus from linguistic content to visual surfaces in her comparison of the New Romantics of the early 1980s to English Romantics such as Byron. Rejecting the assumption that the New Romantics were glib and apolitical, she asserts their carefully managed, glittering surfaces were acts of subversion within Thatcher’s England, and these rock stars’ androgyny and even specific fashion choices—such as the ruffled shirt—carefully and not just coincidentally parallel second generation English Romantics such as Byron. Fluidity of sexual identity served the purpose of resisting full industrialization during 1980s’ England in a way parallel to the poets’ resistance of incipient industrialism in Romantic England, making dandyism and glitter statements against the brutal grayness of the working-class employment described by Löwy and Sayre, a very observable “mechanized conquest of the environment” under industrialization.
This chapter invites readers to compare George Henry Harlow’s 1814 engraving of Byron to one of Adam Ant’s publicity stills for Prince Charming. See the images page for this chapter.
“‘Crying Like a Woman ‘Cause I’m Mad Like a Man’: Chrissie Hynde, Gender, and Romantic Irony” (pp. 61-82) by Sherry R. Truffin, Associate Professor of English, Campbell University.
Chapter summary
Sherry Truffin’s “‘Crying Like a Woman ‘Cause I’m Mad Like a Man’: Chrissie Hynde, Gender, and Romantic Irony” focuses on Chrissie Hynde as the frontwoman for the Pretenders. Truffin considers in Hynde’s lyrics, autobiography, and other resources the ways in which Hynde negotiated her rare position as a female lead singer and rhythm guitarist for an otherwise male rock band. Drawing from Löwy and Sayre, Truffin observes how Hynde resorts to Romantic irony as defined by Schlegel and Anne Mellor to negotiate tensions between the influences of the relatively undeveloped Akron, OH of her early childhood and the industrial city that Akron later became. Truffin also explores how Hynde negotiates her conflicting views of her own female identity by adopting masculine, feminine, and androgynous identities in turns. These tensions ultimately cause Gothic sensibilities to surface in many of Hynde’s songs as her female identity is expressed through Gothic tropes and situations: she suffers violent abuse from men, refuses to complain about that treatment or accept victim status, and then uses that refusal as a means of asserting her own agency.
“A Northern ‘Ode on Melancholy’?—The Music of Joy Division” (pp. 83-100) by Caroline Langhorst, Ph.D Candidate, University of Mainz.
Chapter summary
Further complicating sexual identity, the female, and the Gothic is Caroline Langhorst’s “A Northern ‘Ode on Melancholy’?—The Music of Joy Division.” Her essay inverts the legacy of female Gothic by shifting its focus to the death of a beautiful man. It engages Joy Division’s Ian Curtis as a Romantic figure who follows the Gothic pattern of the dead, young artist, a familiar pattern established by Keats, Shelley, and Byron. Identifying industrial Manchester as the context for Joy Division’s music, Langhorst finds in it the sense of alienation and isolation Löwy and Sayre describe as the inevitable outcome of the industrialized subject. Byron and Keats are especially important as predecessors of Ian Curtis. Curtis, Byron, and Keats share in common a cult of personality inextricably bound up with their early deaths which, afterwards, came to define the reception of these artists’ creative production. Parallels with Keats are also extended to an emphasis on the necessity of suffering.
“‘Little crimeworn histories’: Nick Cave and the Roots-Raves-Rehab Story of Rock Stardom” (pp. 101-120) by Mark McCutcheon, Professor of Literary Studies, Athabasca University. Check out his blog.
Chapter summary
Mark A. McCutcheon shifts the locus of suffering to substance abuse in “‘Little crimeworn histories’: Nick Cave and the Roots-Raves-Rehab Story of Rock Stardom.” McCutcheon examines the commodification of the Romantic tropes of drug use and of the self-destructive artist using Nick Cave as a case study. The art/commerce opposition established within Romantic texts to emphasize the authenticity of the poet/artist has, according to McCutcheon, become a part of the commerce of the music industry in the form of a Roots-Rave-Rehab narrative that governs discourse about artists’ drug use and recovery. In other words, Romantic tropes have been appropriated to serve capitalist ends. McCutcheon’s chapter considers how Nick Cave both exploits and resists this appropriation using a number of strategies, including an exploitation and modification of the traditional Gothic/Romantic trope of the dead woman.
“Postcards from Waterloo: Tom Verlaine’s Historical Constellations” (pp. 121-143) by Len von Morzé, Associate Professor of English, University of Massachusetts, Boston.
Chapter summary
Capitalizing on the anxieties and ambivalence surrounding the figure of Napoleon, Len von Morzé’s “Postcards from Waterloo: Tom Verlaine’s Historical Constellations” explores Verlaine’s use of repetition in his appropriation of Napoleon’s Waterloo as well as Romantic-era texts in order to create contexts for his own work. Von Morzé describes how Verlaine “enframes” the past within his music to legitimate it, thus guiding his self-narrative. Comparing Verlaine to his one-time lover, collaborator, and peer Patti Smith for contrastive purposes, von Morzé emphasizes that Verlaine saw in his Romantic predecessors an “elective affinity” with the Romantics rather than the stronger sense of reenactment Smith had during this period. Ultimately, von Morzé draws out compelling parallels between the two waves of English Romanticism and the two waves of punk rock, positioning Verlaine in a space between poetry and rock because he “could not fully embrace the commercial aspects of mass culture.”
“Manner, Mood, and Message: Bowie, Morrissey, and the Complex Legacy of Frankenstein” (pp. 145-161) by Samuel Lyndon Gladden, Associate Dean of the School of Human Sciences and Humanities and Professor of Literature, University of Houston, Clear Lake.
Chapter summary
Samuel Gladden shifts focus to monstrosity in “Manner, Mood, and Message: Bowie, Morrissey, and the Complex Legacy of Frankenstein.” He compares Bowie’s and Morrissey’s appropriations of the figure of Frankenstein’s Creature to explore their differing responses to isolation and loneliness. In Gladden’s account, Bowie focuses on the discardedness of the Creature as he adopts and discards personae just as Frankenstein abandoned his Creature. Bowie ultimately gathers up many of his previous personae in the song and video “Blackstar,” particularly his first personae, Major Tom, who allows Bowie to revisit the trope of being in an alien environment in anticipation of his own impending death. Morrissey, on the other hand, focuses his attention on the Frankensteinian themes of hybridity or bricolage in “November Spawned a Monster,” emphasizing that Morrissey adopted as his own the hybridity or bricolage associated with the Creature through a variety of personae with disabilities, all of them set within an “idealized past.” The disfigurements of the subject described by Löwy and Sayre, therefore, assume material form in Morrissey’s various personae.
“Tales of the Female Lover: the Poetics of Desire in To Bring You My Love and Is This Desire?” (pp. 163-181) by Catherine Girodet, Ph.D. candidate Université Paul Valéry – Montpellier, and faculty, English Department, Universitie De Creteil.
Chapter summary
Returning to the female Gothic, Catherine Girodet’s “Tales of the Female Lover: the Poetics of Desire on To Bring You My Love and Is This Desire?” begins with the groundwork laid down by Mario Praz in The Romantic Agony and then continued by Abrams and Henderson and others in her exploration of dark Romantic themes in the music of P.J. Harvey. Girodet is particularly interested in the agonies of romantic love as formulated in Harvey’s third and fourth albums, which represent a change in musical direction for Harvey and her first forays into Romanticism. She also explores the implications of Harvey’s music for our consideration of the relationship between the Gothic and the Romantic and how in Harvey’s music the agony of love serves as a conduit to the sublime.
“Emocosms: Mind-Forg’d Realities in Emo(tional) Rock Music” (pp. 183-197) by Eike Träger, Ph.D. candidate, University of Cologne, Köln, Germany.
Chapter summary
Romantic artists at times exploit dark moods for artistic purposes. Eike Träger’s “The World Is Mine: Pathetic Fallacy and Mind-Forg’d Realities in Emo(tional) Rock Music” identifies the pathetic fallacy and heterocosm as two points of affinity between English Romanticism and emo music. Relying on Sayre’s and Löwy’s “Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity,” Träger sees in emo “a Weltschmerz that literally creates a cosmos of pain in lyrical form” in the music of bands such as The Danburrys, the Deftones, AFI, and La Dispute. Setting up and then dismantling Ruskin’s theory of art as means of explaining emo music, he ultimately argues that emo bands are aligned with “resigned” Romanticism in Sayre’s and Löwy’s taxonomy: emo music is a form of Romanticism in its emphasis on affect and the individual, but because it is distinctly apolitical, it differs from both first and second generation English Romantics.
“‘I possess your soul, your mind, your heart, and your body’: External and Internal Gothic Hauntings in Eminem’s Relapse” (pp. 199-213) by Christopher Stampone, Ph.D., Southern Methodist University.
Chapter summary
Christopher Stampone’s “‘I possess your soul, your mind, your heart, and your body’: External and Internal Gothic Hauntings in Eminem’s Relapse” focuses on Eminem’s pivotal albums Relapse (2009) and its follow-up, Relapse: Refill (2010), as instances of contemporary Romantic Gothic. Defining these albums as attacks on American consumer culture, Stampone employs Sayre and Löwy to describe the features of that attack, much of which takes the form of resigned Romanticism, so that resignation can be a form of resistance. Stampone also describes how Eminem’s alter egos, such as Slim Shady, represent his drug-ridden self, one that is implicated in capitalist-consumer culture but for which Eminem now takes responsibility. Overall, Eminem’s Relapse albums hold up a mirror to modern US consumerism in which “all become monsters whose identities are constructed by what they consume.”
“‘The Female Is Such Exquisite Hell’: The Romantic Agony of My Dying Bride” (pp. 215-233) by Matthew J. Heilman, Ph.D., Duquesne University.
Chapter summary
Matthew Heilman’s “‘The Female Is Such Exquisite Hell’: The Romantic Agony of My Dying Bride” engages Poe’s emphasis on the “death of the beautiful woman” to evaluate My Dying Bride’s work as instances of feminist Romanticism. Through artist interviews and song analysis, Heilman explores central tropes of dark Romanticism—the dead or dying woman and the femme fatale—in both My Dying Bride’s lyrics and in the poetry of Poe, Keats, Baudelaire, and Swinburne to argue that My Dying Bride’s lyrics exploit nineteenth-century dark Romantic tropes of the woman to deconstruct them.
“Ashes Against the Grain: Black Metal and the Grim Rebirth of Romanticism” (pp. 235-257) by Julian Knox, Assistant Professor of English, Georgia College.
Chapter summary
This collection ends with Julian Knox’s “Ashes Against the Grain: Black Metal and the Grim Rebirth of Romanticism.” The genre of rock called “heavy metal” is often said to have begun in the 1970s with the bands Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, but heavy metal has since branched out into a variety of subgenres, including thrash, death, doom, and even folk metal, which blends regional folk music and traditional instrumentation with heavy metal. Knox argues that one of these subgenres, black metal, self-consciously draws from and then exceeds, sometime ironically, Gothic and dark Romantic literary tropes to promulgate an aesthetic of death and decay that one black metal musician called “Werewolf Romanticism.” Knox explores bands such as Burzum, Mayhem, Xasthur, and Varathron and their uses of Romantic-era literature and painting by figures such as Shelley, Blake, Byron, Novalis, Goëthe, and Freidrich to define Romantic rejection of the pastoral—which was seen by figures such as Novalis and Hoffmann as capitulation to power structures—as a form of inwardness or psychologizing. These figures explore Plato’s cave as the skull of the mind, the collective voices of the dead, to assert or affirm their individuality against capitalism.
Music
Note: many passing references to music, literature, and artworks are excluded from this list. If a specific song was not available, or if an album was mentioned but not a specific song, representative examples were taken for the iTunes playlist.
This is a somewhat modified repost of an entry originally published in September of 2014. I thought I’d revisit and update it because I’m teaching an introduction to creative writing course this semester, and my class and I have been covering the creative process over the last couple of chapters.
Artists and their Art
I’m going to start by illustrating my points from two films: New York Stories and Bullets Over Broadway. I won’t be discussing it here, but I would also recommend the film S.O.B.
New York Stories is an anthology film featuring three short films by Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Woody Allen, respectively. Scorsese’s and Coppola’s films aren’t at all characteristic of their usual work and are wonderful, magical, and worth watching. Allen’s contribution is a hilarious abstract of his entire life’s work. If you can pick up or stream these films, don’t pass them by.
Scorcese’s short, Life Lessons, is about New York artist Lionel Dobie (perf. Nick Nolte) and his much younger live-in protégé and lover Paulette (perf. Rosanna Arquette) immediately before a big opening for one of Dobie’s shows. They have become estranged but are still living together. Dobie remains sexually obsessed with Paulette, while Paulette continues living with Dobie to be mentored by him, and to receive some confidence in and validation of her work as an artist from him.
He continually withholds his praise, however, always coming back to, “Well, what do you think?”, which increasingly frustrates her. She, in turn, teases him sexually almost to the point of torture while still withholding herself from him, largely as punishment for his refusal to validate her work. I think she would even have been happy with a clear invalidation, for that matter — so that she could know she was wasting her time. But she didn’t get anything from Dobie either way. This dysfunctional dynamic, combined with how difficult it is to live with Dobie (he can only paint with his music on at almost concert level volumes), ultimately drives her away in a rage right before his show.
But what’s particularly interesting about the film is its depiction of the artistic process. The more tense, dysfunctional, and intense this dysfunction became, the better Dobie was able to paint. Her screaming and their shared frustration seemed to fuel him creatively. On the night of the show, he attends alone, and at the end we see him recruit a new young female protégé, one clearly hoping to be mentored by him, and for his part clearly intended to serve as his perverse, dysfunctional inspiration for his next project.
Now just hold this picture in your mind while I move on to the next film: Bullets Over Broadway. Bullets is about young, idealistic playwright David Shayne (perf. John Cusack) who seems to be seeking fame with marginal talent. He cuts a deal with a mob boss to get financing for his play: in exchange for financing, the play will star the mob boss’s girlfriend, Olive Neal (perf. Jennifer Tilly). To both keep her safe and to make sure that David lives up to his end of the bargain, the boss assigns hitman Cheech (perf. Chaz Palminteri) to attend rehearsals.
In the course of rehearsing the play, however, David’s bad writing is confronted by the professional actors he hired. Cheech, sitting in the position of the audience and the critic, virtually rewrites the play with David as it is being rehearsed: Cheech has a talent for character, narrative, pacing, and lines that David doesn’t. In short, Cheech is a real writer.
When the play goes to performance, it is universally praised, with the exception of Olive’s acting. Olive is not only a bad actress but something of an idiot. When that becomes apparent to everyone, Cheech does what needs to be done: he drives her out to the docks and shoots her, dumping her body in the water. Olive’s part is then played by a professional actress and the play goes on to be widely acclaimed and to a national tour.
What I’d like us to consider here are two characteristics of the artist beyond talent:
1. You’re willing to kill for your work. Short of that, you’re certainly willing to do anything else. It’s the work that matters.
2. What you think about your work is what matters. You know that because you’re the artist. You may listen to others, but in the end, it’s what you think that matters.
Now, you’re reading this post to learn how to develop your creativity. I have two questions for you:
1. Are you willing to kill for your work? What are you really willing to do to create something great? For anyone with any kind of moral compass, the answer is always “No, I’d never kill anyone,” so let me follow up with another question: If it really came down to it, would you at least be seriously tempted?
2. Do you think external validation for your work is irrelevant, at least while you are creatingit?
If you don’t answer “Yes” to both of those questions, you’re not really an artist yet, and your creativity will be hampered. You’re in the position of Paulette, who wants to please an audience and get praised for it (in this case, Dobie), or David, who wants to get famous. But you’re not focused on the work itself. You’re focused on drawing external resources inward (which is narcissism) instead of projecting internal resources outward (which is creativity).
Both films affirm this answer in their own ways. Dobie’s refusal to validate or invalidate Paulette’s work was actually the best thing for her, the thing most likely to transform her into an artist. Asking, “What do you think?” directed her to the only question that matters, at least during the creative process. He was trying to get her to fall back upon her own resources, to exercise her own critical judgment of her own work, to act and think like she knew what she was doing.
Everyone wants a great review: don’t get me wrong. But while you’re creating, what you think is what matters. Getting feedback on the finished product — if the feedback is professional, good, and focused on your intent for your work — that helps too. But in the end, it’s what you think that really matters. But do you know what needs to matter even more than your opinion of the work? More than anything else, in fact, even more than you yourself? The work.
Not your reputation, your praise, your recognition, your self-image as an artist, your theory of art, your ideals about art, or the politics or beliefs underlying your art: just the work itself. That’s why Scorsese’s representation of the true artist was someone willing to kill to perfect his play. It was easy for him because he was a hitman, but I think the artist part of him would have been just as willing to kill himself for his work if, somehow, that is what it took to perfect it. At least in theory: in reality, that’s never the case. Suicides for art are generally committed by pseudo-artists seeking fame.
If you know what it’s like to selflessly love your children, I think you know what I’m talking about, but I only say that with the caveat that to develop as an artist you need to understand that your work really isn’t your baby. That means you’re willing to sacrifice anything within the work itself to perfect the work. The real killing takes place during the creative process, a sacrifice made within the creative work itself.
Creativity vs. Narcissism
Next, I’d like to return to the idea that creativity is the act of projecting internal resources outward. It’s not unusual, of course, to see an artist’s work as a representation of his or her experiences. Perhaps the best statement to this effect is Wordsworth’s 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads. But that’s only partly what I’m talking about.
What I really mean to allude to here is the artist’s management of emotional resources to create art (also the subject of Wordsworth’s Preface, by the way). When you create anything, you’re usually going to have to tap in to some reserve of emotional resources that allows you to create, or to some defining experience that has somehow created the person that you are, or to a compelling emotional need. Whatever that emotional core is, you will draw from it to create, and your creations will somehow be reflective of that.
Now I’m not talking about “writing what you know,” and I’m not claiming that all art is autobiographical. That is dealing with art in the realm of fact: character, plot, setting, etc. Content is interchangeable: the emotional core of a work is what I’m talking about. What makes Stephen King keep writing horror? What makes Nicholas Sparks keep writing romance? Why did Zane Grey focus on adventure and the west? In each case, the author’s creativity comes from some kind of inner emotional core, but that emotion varies widely by artist. It may be fear in some people, anger in others, romantic love in others, sex in others, or depression, or joy, or politics, or God, or just one specific woman or man… all of these result in very different creative products.
Now I’d like to add a caveat here: not everyone writes like this. Some writers (let’s just talk about writers for now) — and these are among the most productive professionals — see writing as a bag of tricks that they can manipulate expertly to any effect. But this meme here exists for a reason: talking about your art is a seemingly narcissistic enterprise. That’s why I started this post with a longish discussion of two films. It’s too easy to spend too much time talking about yourself when writing about the subject of creativity.
When I am able to write something, I have to manipulate emotional material. And that emotional material has to be linked to a word, an idea, or an image. But once I have distinct emotional material linked to a distinct image or word or line, I can write. I usually think next of poetic form — which poetic form is best suited to this content — and then I write.
Art and Its Sources
My history of creative writing began in a small way in high school, but in a much bigger way in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when I started publishing poetry. And then I started graduate school in 1999, and my creative writing stopped almost completely. Around 2009 I started teaching 200 level creative writing classes, so I started writing again, and then in 2014 I hit some inspiration yet again and started writing poetry much more prolifically than I had in the past. In every period in which I wrote, I found some emotional content, latched onto it consciously and deliberately, found words for it, and wrote. But I’d like you to consider the variety of emotional content that we experience every day: it ranges from deep, long-term commitments to fleeting thoughts. However, when you turn any of those into a creative work, they all develop the same profile: they seem big and important.
That’s just not always the case subjectively, though. On more than one occasion during these writing spurts, I’ve had people close to me ask me some specific questions about my personal life because of the poems I’ve written. Are you okay? Need to talk? Alright, who is she? I totally understand that: the questions always reveal the insights of a friend who knows me. And if every poem that I wrote had the same emotional profile, particularly the one implied by the poem, I would need friends asking those questions.
Furthermore — and here we’re getting into territory that helps us interpret as well as create art — whenever I grab an emotion and turn it into a poem it becomes something else. Whatever the emotion was that I first relied upon to create is transformed in the creative process, so that the emotion communicated through the work is in somewhat different form the emotion present in the finished work. T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” has become for me, therefore, more than a significant theoretical work from the early twentieth century. I now understand it as a personal statement with some applicability to me.
So, you’ve read this far: very far. I think you deserve to have it all boiled down to a few bullet points. So here you go. If you want to create,
Care about the work itself above all else.
As a corollary:
Forget about yourself: think only about the work.
Forget about being a writer or artist. Focus on writing or creating art.
Forget about being creative. Focus on creating.
Forget about what other people think. What does the work do for you?
And forget that self-conscious assumption that your work is bad, which is always just fear of rejection. I’m going to break up with him/her before s/he breaks up with me.
Do whatever it takes to grab that emotion that will allow you to create.
But don’t be a sociopath. People are always more important than things: “Every thing that lives is holy.”
Create. If you want to be creative, create.
I’d like to conclude by articulating an unspoken assumption that’s been guiding my thoughts so far. You actually need to know something about your art. You need to know its history, master its conventions, understand the theories behind it. I’ve been able to refer to a couple of texts about creativity here only because I’ve read them. You need to train your knowledge of your art academically. By “academically” I don’t necessarily mean for college credit, but by studying the field systematically. And you need to train or develop your taste. If you don’t develop your taste, you’ll be one of the worst kinds of artists: you will believe that only your own opinion about the work matters, and your opinion will suck. You’ll be an idiot about your own work. Good luck with that.
Final bit of advice: quit thinking about being creative. Quit studying being creative. Quit reading about being creative. Go out and create something. Above all else, quit being such a coward. Create. Become a god.
This is a somewhat modified repost of an entry originally published in September of 2014. I thought I’d revisit and update it because I’m teaching an introduction to creative writing course this semester, and my class and I have been covering the creative process over the last couple of chapters.
James Rovira 