Dreamscenes

The very act of trying to define art seems to me a concept predestined for failure. Art is not about definition, it is about emotion. Art is a personal abstraction of the subconscious the artist chooses to share with others. (However, said creations would be no less art if they were never seen by another.)

When art is shown to others, it is wrong for those others to assume they can pinpoint the piece's one "meaning"; the claim is false, since not even the artist may fully understand what a piece is saying. Yet it is exactly this sort of thinking that has led to a pollution of art; not just of critics and "intellectuals" who claim to understand -- and spend much time and precious paper disputing the equally valid understandings of others -- but also of some artists themselves, who go about trying to fashion one, single meaning into their work, overridng the call of their abstract emotional responses and leaving us with pieces devoid of the necessary subconscious reactions called feeling.

To think about feelings is an odd concept in the first place. A feeling -- an emotional response to something -- is raw; indescribable. Yet this is exactly what the artist attempts to do: to put down in their chosen medium this arbitrary response to an image, an event, or something from out of the blue.

My own poems reflect my feelings as truly as possible, in a raw, untouched state. They are sudden, dirty reflections; revision would destroy that sentiment. The poetry is in me and is constant; occasionally, I write it down in a rapid burst of lines that end as quickly as they arise. To then go back and revise that feeling -- to try and say it it another, clearer, way -- would be to add in any new experiences I have encountered or biases I have formed about what the poem says to me. To later revise a poem wuld be to betray the original moment and impose upon it a new moment.

I do not write about consciously preconceived ideas in my poetry and I do not think it possible to go back and insert a consciously preconceived idea, wherever that idea may have come from. And how could any poet, honestly, make a true feeling clear? They would need a universal image to which everyone can relate; a universal image that would, by its very existence, define a specific feeling. And as stated earlier, art holds no place for definition.

I do not believe all of my poems are good or can even be considered "poetry." But when I do manage to skirt cognition and put down a semi-coherant series of emotions to go back and peruse, then I feel I have accomplished something, if not the creation of a poem.

My poems are not about making my feelings clear and accessible to all; they are doorways which allow passage to my subconscious. And in seeing me perhaps you will realize something hidden within yourself.

Is art revised time?
An emotion,
not pure,
but altered to say it right?
(in case you give away too much
about yourself)
If that is art,
I am no artist.

Call me an Emotionist:
My art is my time.