Creatively critical/critically creative

Or, what do I think I'm doing here anyway?

Hello, love! Welcome to my new subscribers and welcome back to all. There is a reason for my use of “love” here. Just read on…

It’s six months since I started Inkwasting on Substack. My initial intention was simple: to have a place where I could gather the poems I’ve published and share them with people. Now six months on, I have almost 100 subscribers (thank you!) and I’ve found a place where I can share not only poetry but also my love of literature with a thoughtful, uplifting community.

In my first Substack post, I mused on Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, an essay which encapsulates my dual, intertwined concerns of poetry and criticism. I wasn’t exactly intending to exercise my critical interests on Substack but the lure of writing about literature has proven irresistible. So much so that when I looked at Linda Carroll’s excellent advice on grouping content on my homepage, I realised that I had already tagged each post either ‘poetry’ or ‘criticism’ and I could use that to organise things.

But what do I mean by criticism? Should I even be tagging these posts with that label? When I was a graduate student working towards my PhD and teaching undergraduates, I understood (and taught) “literary criticism” to be researching, understanding and interpreting literary texts and their intersecting cultural, social and historical contexts. I was a medievalist and new historicist by training so the crossovers of culture, politics, literature were part and parcel of my worldview at the time (and when I say ‘worldview’, I mean my dissertation). In his introduction to Literary Criticism: A Political History, Joseph North draws a distinction between ‘criticism’ and ‘scholarship’, arguing that in the last fifty or so years literary academic endeavour focused on historicism and “exchanged the project of evaluative criticism…for the very different project of ‘cultural analysis’.” Scholarship won over criticism. North sees this as a “depoliticising retreat” in response to neo-liberalism which left literary studies in the academy without an active commitment to changing or intervening in culture rather than simply analysing its products. I find this especially interesting from the perspective of a former/recovering academic as I always saw the medieval ‘literary’ texts I studied as engaged in and even influencing the politically-inflected conversations of their time. ‘Politics’ and ‘Literature’ as separate categories don’t exist in the medieval period.

The image above from the recent British Library exhibition ‘Medieval Women: In Their Own Words’ shows writer Christine de Pizan writing and learning with Reason, Justice and Rectitude (on the left) and building the ‘City of Ladies’ (on the right). The image that we more often associate with Christine is one from the same manuscript which shows her alone writing in her study — I have this image on my Welcome page — but this is another side to her, a compelling image of writing as literary practice in the world rather than cloistered in an ivory tower. I was delighted to discover this other side to Christine, a visual representation of the movements between text and culture which animates the meaning of literary studies for me. I want the combination of aesthetic beauty and intellectual thrill that comes from studying literature as part of the world — scholarship AND criticism, in North’s terms — but even more than that, interpretation as inspiration.

Poetry, criticism, scholarship. As I write, I realise that these things are not necessarily different (at least not in my mind), but part of an integrated creative critical engagement and mindset. I write poetry as creative critical intervention. For example, my poem “The Monster Playbook” emerged from my reading of Beowulf and related critical essays, most notably Cohen’s “Monster Culture: Seven Theses” and Tolkien’s “The Monster and the Critics”.

And my poem on Curley’s Wife, which reframes the portrayal of her in Steinbeck’s novel, emerged directly from teaching Of Mice and Men (on repeat) for GCSE.

If poetry for me is a creative-critical intervention, criticism is a equally a creative endeavour. Inkwasting Toy of Mine is creative criticism, critical creativity — all of it imperfectly doing the work of thinking about literary culture on some level. And if the contradictions and tensions of this public/private, academic/non-academic, critical/scholarly literary/cultural writing sometimes seem to much to bear, well, as Natalie Diaz says “most of us live in a state of impossibility” which is perhaps another way of saying, I know can’t do it but I’ll do it anyway.

I started this post with “Hello, love”, a (mis)quotation from Kay Dick’s novella They. In this eerie and unsettling dystopian world, artists of all kinds, writers, musicians, sculptors, are creating their works against a backdrop of a sinister and relentless erosion of art. The unknown ‘They’ censor books, burn works of art and destroy its creators. ‘They’ are unstoppable yet the creator-characters of the narrative cannot help resisting them by continuing their work, memorising where they cannot write down, creating anew when something is torn down. As life becomes ever more obscurely terrifying and sinister, the nameless first person narrator forms the habit of welcoming each day:

“‘Hallo, love,’ I said, every day to each morning. A greeting to space and time. A ritual. Keeping my hand in. It was always possible that through space and time it might be heard.”

— Kay Dick, They

The expression makes evident the creative endeavour as a communicative act of love. Equally, love is present in the critical mind, coming to a literary work or cultural artefact in order to understand it, to live with it and within it, perhaps to recreate it in other forms.

So until next time…hello, love.

Childe Hassam, Bowl of Goldfish 1912.