…
Instead of looking at thirty or forty poems, you’re looking at two hundred poems and saying, “Here are the forty best ones, now make a book.”
Yeah. So I’m in that mode of resisting the convention of materiality and productivity. I feel like in a capitalist society we put so much emphasis on end product. Writers do it to each other. It’s a kind of unconscious shaming that writers will sort of say to one another, “So, are you writing? Are you working on anything?” Like, “Are you an actual writer?”
Oh, yeah. As if to say no is to admit some sort of deficiency.
In every other aspect of our lives, we have periods of rest where we don’t worry about the fact that we’re not in our office. We take time off from practically everything in life, except, for some reason, in the arts we feel like we always have to be working. I think that we’ve made a kind of enslavement of our own creativity. Like it’s a genie whose lamp we rub and summon, and we have to do it numerous times otherwise we’re not legitimate. So I’m enjoying being illegitimate.
Read the whole piece here: DIVEDAPPER // D.A. Powell
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