I love that picture. Sometimes you can find really spectacular things on the DD page.

In other news that “catman” thing is pretty cool.

Welcome to my blog. : )

“for me criticism at its best is very much creative—many of the best pieces are as rewarding to me as a good story might be for someone else. what i look for is a chance to see things a little differently.”

I think those are pretty good criteria for criticism/theory, although we may differ on what is creative or what allows us to see things differently.

At this point, I should probably apologize for my strong position, since it’s out of sync with the tone of the remaining comments. I should also add that I found James’s essay tedious and quite pompous.

A note on the art of science, though: Original scientific endeavour is a process that is rife with creativity. It is the process of extremely inventive and selective destruction with an aim to study what remains, in order to design equally inventive construction towards a productive goal. Speaking of dissection, a scientific study can observe start and end, but never the process. At best, one can identify checkpoints in a process, but the actual process itself is left to conjecture, and theories that present a picture that is consistent with what has been observed.

It is very similar with art as well. All you can do is observe checkpoints. The difficult part is assigning process to something that has no fixed path. It is not productive to do so, either, for it would result in templatization of creativity, at which point it would negate the very concept of creativity, which is to expand the scope of behaviours beyond the template.

It is probably also wise to add here that my ideas are considered to be ‘hack theories’ by some, so I hope you have a salt dispenser handy.

@ Scherezade

You are incapable of spam.

@ Jon

I will stay out of the art/science debate, but I’m still curious about your dislike for criticism/theory. The word “dissecting” reflects that — it’s an unpleasant word and suggests that what will be revealed after the dissection is a pile of guts. Not pretty at all.

But you can’t really dissect the artistic process. Few have attempted to do so. However, explorations of it do exist, and often they’re quite revelatory. I’ve read a couple of personal essays on creative processes for MFA/MA theses.

What is the sort of criticism that is all glare and scalpel with no style or art of its own? I know it’s out there, but I need an example.

The strength of the debate is based entirely on the distance that the poet maintains from his readers. For example, the work of Charles Bukowski is more literal and visceral while a Charles Wright is a little more reserved and open to some interpretation. Both the poets appear to the reader, but the distance of this vision is determined by the verse.

But there is no denying that poetry is as personal as it gets. A Gregory Orr writes because of the cathartic experience it evokes in him and some of the writings of Plath mirrored her state of emotional turmoil during the latter part of her life. Poetry is a celebration of living, a way of sharing experiences that are universal and reaching out to others in the hopes that even if you cannot plumb to the bottom of your heart, perhaps you can unclog that tiny drain in the heart of the other.