Something New to Sing About
In this, my triumphant return to the Linebreak blog, I’ll just say it: I sympathize with the artists on Cracked’s list of “5 Musicians Who Need to Find Something New to Sing About“.
Granted, this is only because I’m notoriously guilty of writing no fewer than 3 kinds of poems. True story. So, at least, I sympathize to some minimal degree, which is to say mostly as a knee-jerk reaction.
Comfort me: Are there poets besides me who ought to do anything it takes - anything – if it means new subject matter? What are your habitual poem topics? Which cliches need to stop immediately? (For example: Are you going to hunt down a dog next time you read the word “ether”? Tired of Salt Lake City and midnight buffets showing up in Poetry – often in the same poem? I know I am.)
Help these tired poets: Comment sections exist for several reasons, and this is one of them. Use an alias if you must – like Judger McJudgerson. Or, you know, one that’s clever at all.
My Advice:
1. Cage a Jameson scholar in your office – one specializing in the theorist, the whiskey. Better: Specializing in both. 2. Pick up an adderall-driven prostitute problem. 3. Launch a mad quest, following the pirate map you drew on the back of a Wendy’s napkin three years ago, to rediscover Dr. Phil; keep in mind that this effort should be rooted in the good Christian guilt resulting from mass-murdering bluejays with an automatic pellet gun. Yes. Or not?
I’ll stop, having already been more than disturbing enough for reason. I don’t want to alienate more of our readers than I ought.
Apologies to the world-in-general. (So much sorrow fills me!)
I think this topic is timeless. It seems, though, that if a poet or writer or musician is doing the good work of writing/composing often, reading/listening new work, and living in the world, the work should change. I’m still interested in many of the same things I started writing about seven years ago, but they come out differently now even if there is a common voice at the core.
I’ve even received encouragement (especially for the sake of a ms.) to dig back into a certain topic and write even more poems of the same focus.
Generally, I think a couple of problems lie in the way:
One, being reluctance to change due to fear of how new work will be accepted (or because one thing/style/voice was so well praised that the author feels compelled to continue the pattern…
Victoria Chang talks about this same topic from a slightly different angle in a recent post here: (http://bit.ly/8A8fV0).
So many of us write because we feel called to. At the same time, many of us are working to be “career poets” of some sort—that is, to find success in this lifetime. But I think it is important to keep in mind that if we are to be remembered at all it will most likely be for one or two poems.
I say keep writing what you love.
As a fine poet once told me, we writers have the luxury of following our obsessions, or, in the words of Ben Kweller, “Stick to love songs, kid, that’s all you’re knowin’.”
Ashley -
You can’t make a new subject appear, I don’t believe, and if you do, it will ring false (won’t it?).
‘Subject’ itself seems like the wrong way to consider lyric poetry; maybe dramatic or narrative, but not lyric.
For me, frogs in a shoebox (not enough time to atone), and mosquito hawks on the wing.
RA