a pod, a parka of opportunity, and a study concluded

this week's diary

1.

I have an idea for a podcast: It would be a series of interviews with writers, artists, musicians, actors, directors, chefs, etc., and we would talk about how they understand the purpose of what they make/do. It might be called Statement of Purpose, sort of like the essays you write to apply for school or a grant. God, I always hated writing those essays. I was like, contextualize my poetry within the canon? Describe my project? Babe, poetry is screaming at me to write it and writing poetry is like giving a rose to everyone you know and it’s a personal form of anarchy which must be very aesthetically precise to be meaningful and I believe in jokes and the soul and I think poetry is an archaeology of an endless moment and I think it is essentially an improvisation trapped in amber and I never revise poems because that seems like trying to revise, I’m sorry, a fart, and I write about things I like because I like them, which seems like a vacuous position to take except when you consider how much of liking something is actually a way of reading it against the sky and, and, and! And how dare you ask me, is this not obvious to you??

Oh, if I had ever been honest for a moment, this is what I would have written in my applications. Instead I tried on various biographical and identity-based poses, because that seemed to be the way of things. Which I’ve never been able to do convincingly, because I don’t consider any of my identities to be very meaningful to what I write, ultimately.

I thought that, because I had passion, I didn’t need to have a statement of purpose. I thought that it was essentially a slick advertising construct disguised as an academic précis. I think I feared that even articulating the aims and worldview underneath my aesthetic choices would deaden them. I never realized that defining my purpose could actually be a way of making my writing more legible to people.

As much as it hurt like a cannonball through the gut when my second book was rejected last December, it was also a tremendous gift because I took the time, finally, to figure out what purpose, what organizing principle I wanted to move by. Instead of moving by the organizing principle of “I hope u like me!!!,” the effects of which are ultimately kind of hollow even when they work out well. And of course, readers will read everything as it pleases them to … but in order to be found by the readers who will be into what you do, you have to send up rockets. And rockets are decisive! They are assertive, and eye-catching. And a purpose can be like that.

That’s what we’ll talk about in this podcast: How do we decide what our art is for, and what we want it to do? How do we embrace that? And if we feel like getting positively wild—how is it that purpose overlaps with the great taboo of marketing?

So what do you think? Would you listen? Would you tell your friends to listen? Would you help me get in touch with David Lynch? How would you tweak this idea? Who would you want to hear interviewed?

Photo by Toby Elliott on Unsplash