I wonder a lot about an artist's relationship to pain. How important it is to art and how it manifests itself in the artistic process. So while I read through "The Triggering Town," I held that idea in mind. There were many portions of the "Statements of Faith" chapter that caused me to reflect on the idea, but none so much as on page 73 when he notes that "the imagination is faced with the problem of preserving the world through internalization, then keeping that world rigidly fixed long enough to create the unknowns in the poem."
Is that why so much of our societies' artistic reflection is married to the feelings of loss, grief, and destruction? Is it because pain is the most readily available resource to artists and can be internalized and rationalized in an authentic way because all people have known it? Maybe not, but it seems to me that pain could be one of the easiest things to cultivate in the imagination and therefore for the mind to preserve in relation to the world. It also makes it a little easier to believe that when Faulkner was asked "Why do you drink so much?" that his reply: "for the pain" was more likely in relation to keeping it "alive."
I love this question, and I've been spending a lot of time thinking about it, since my doctoral exams were asking very similar questions about the role of poetry. One thing I thought about a lot is the fact that pain is something that occurs so deeply within the individual body, that it is destructive to language. Someone asks us to describe our pain, and we must resort to numbers, or to metaphor ("stabbing pain," "like I was hit by a train," etc.). Do we write because we cannot express this pain? Do we write because there is some human need to express the inexpressible? Do we write because this is a way of asserting empathy, a voice, a momentary expression within a collective suffering, or more positively, a collective experience? I think keeping all these questions in mind can make for poetry that transcends the individual experience.
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