This blog has been silent all summer, mainly because I’ve tried (half-heartedly) and failed to articulate my experiences throughout the summer in a way that is relevant to the theme of this blog – what law and poetry have in common. I got a summer job at a non-profit organization run by students in the law department. It holds free legal advice clinics for low-income people throughout the Greater Vancouver Regional District. Through the school year, the clinics are held in community centres one night per week or every couple of weeks and staffed by volunteer students. In the summer, certain lucky student who volunteered all year get paid to staff the clinics every day.
So I spent most days this summer at a community centre in East Vancouver talking to low-income people about their problems. My clinic wasn’t particularly busy compared to some of the others, and I didn’t feel like I did a lot of practical or substantial work to actually help anyone. I went to criminal court a couple of times to defend clients, but I really have no interest in criminal law, so while it was satisfying to get the result my clients wanted, I can’t say I really enjoyed that experience. Most of my clients had strange, complicated problems with no obvious legal solution. The lasting impression I got from the experience is that the line between legal work, social work and counselling is a blurry one. Just talking about their problems and articulating the various issues they are dealing with seemed to help some of the clients; receiving acknowledgement from a sympathetic listener seemed to be really important to them. I wrote several letters on behalf of my clients, helped them file small claims in the provincial court system, did one will, and gave out a lot of summary advice and referrals to other organizations that may or may not have been able to provide more help.
Coming from a background of studying experimental poetry and literary theory at the undergrad and graduate levels, this is the most pragmatic, socially-oriented job I’ve ever done, and I’ve been grateful for the opportunity, but I found it frustrating that things were often unresolved and out of my control. It’s very common to lose touch with clients – they are homeless, or their phones are suddenly out of service, or they are too drug-addled to be reliable enough to stay in contact. Often I would do research and prepare a response only to find that the client was inaccessible.
This job has been a novel experience for me, and while I wanted to express something about it, I didn’t want to harp on about the gritty underbelly of society and its lyric charm or its distance from poetry, and lamely tie my day-to-day encounters into the theme of this blog.
Anyway, a couple of things in the past couple of weeks crystallized some ideas I’ve had about community and the value of contributing.
All the work we do at the legal clinics is approved by a supervising lawyer. At the end of the summer, he gave a speech that I’m paraphrasing as, “The thing to remember about the practice of law is that it gets you connected. It gets you connected to the people who need you, it gets you connected to humanity, and it makes you useful. We’re lucky that we can help people, because so many people in our society are so disconnected. Let’s have a toast to our clients, thank god they need us.” So cool. And so apt: that’s why I want to learn a profession; I want to be useful. As much as I love reading, writing, thinking about poetry and language, history and theory, they are very introspective activities. I feel like I live in my head. I’m very involved in my own interaction with language, very self-absorbed as a writer. I don’t necessarily produce any poetry or have any ideas about poetry that, you know, have any use, and they certainly don’t help anyone.
And yet. About a week and a half ago, I attended filling Station’s Calgary Blow-Out, a three-day extravaganza of Calgary writing. Having been involved in the Calgary writing scene, and not having contributed at all yet to the Vancouver writing scene, reading at the Blow-Out was very much a visit home, in a sense one more entry to the list of all the readings I’ve done in Calgary. A lot of the people who have been supporting my writing for as long as I’ve been writing seriously were there, and most of them were also reading, as well as a lot of other writers whom I’ve met over the past six or seven years, and some who I hadn’t met yet. Calgary has an incredibly energetic, tight knit writing scene. It’s a wonderful community, and I realized (well, not for the first time or anything) how lucky I am to have been part of it and to still be a long-distance contributor. My writing is far from accessible, and the difficulty with writing experimental, innovative (I hope) poetry is that there are no reliable arbiters of quality or relevance. The best one can hope for is a receptive audience. The audiences I read to in Calgary have always been not only receptive, but encouraging, enthusiastic and supportive. Then again, the audiences I read to in Calgary are composed of roughly the same people each time. Poetry is an esoteric interest. Like any other city, Calgary has a small community of people who care about poetry, and it’s not likely to grow.
I’m fascinated with the contrast between these two roles I play. On the one hand, I’m involved in a specialized, marginalized art form that appeals to a select number of people who gather in small spaces to share their complicated relationships to the phenomenon the rest of the world takes for granted, i.e. language.
On the other hand, I become involved in the problems of a more or less random selection of people who don’t know who I am and don’t really care beyond the possibility that I can apply some of my knowledge and skills to alleviate their difficulties.
I don’t think one is better method of contributing to community than the other. When I’m right in the thick of either one, for example while I was reading at the Blow-Out, I do wonder why the hell I ever got into the other one. But for the most part, I think they balance one another. It’s good to have a creative, intellectual project, and more importantly to have the support and company of peers involved in similar projects. But it’s also good to be exposed to such a wide range of people I wouldn’t normally meet and to try to empathize with their lives, and to put my education, talents, skills and intelligence to use for them.
So, overall a good summer.
15 hours ago
2 comments:
""I don’t necessarily produce any poetry or have any ideas about poetry that, you know, have any use, and they certainly don’t help anyone.""
yes, but not everyone is going to use poetry for "help," either, but some people certainly will read others' poetry and be responsible for it, i.e. instead of hoping that the poetry will tell them something useful right off the bat, the reader has to _make_ something useful out of the poetry. i think that in north america we put too much pressure on ourselves to be
"useful" and "productive" in the sense that we are doing something _directly_ to effect/affect others...perhaps this is the residue from a capitalist/protestant work ethic that wants poets etc. to feel guilty about not producing capital. but certainly the ability to be introspective--to conduct an intellectual and spiritual investigation of the self--is an ability that's highly undervalued, even made-fun-of, joked about, ignored by english departments. theo-philosophically, the self is really the only object of study, since even language is tempered by the self; the "world" registers itself upon us _through_ the senses and is _taken into_ the body (an idea that was well articulated by Lee Maracle when she was in Vancouver in late June). the social manifests itself to the individual only insofar as the individual allows it to enter.
to constantly think of poetry as having to be useful is paradoxical and self-punishing; i've met a few poets caught up in the constant worry about whether or not poetry is actually useful, will it save the world, etc. i find that people caught in this circular thought pattern tend to forget that a poem is still just a poem; it _can_ engage with the social in a discursive sense, but, by itself, it can't do anything unless a reader takes responsibility for what
s/he's reading and somehow _makes_ it useful...i mean that the paradox here is that yes of course poetry can't be _useful_ in the sense that it won't automatically change the world as such, and if a writer gets caught up at this level of thinking, then poetry ceases to have any use at all: the writer gives up h/er responsibility to take writing seriously as a form of personal (spiritual?) engagement with the social through language that can be shared with others interested in forming the same engagement.
also: is a _useful_ poetry desireable anyway? if it's _useful_ does that mean we're getting paid? and if we're getting paid, who's going to tell us what to write in order to fulfill the terms of the contract? i feel confident in saying that creative people are continually poisoned by the ubiquitous discourse of capital to feel guilty about being "self-absorbed" and introspective because people that are interested in studying the relationship of the self to the world are simultaneously less able to join the workforce. i also think that "self-absorbed" is a very negative term (and inappliclable to you, Natalie) that applies to writers who write self-indulgently about themselves, who aren't responsible enough to use poetry to engage with the world.
jw
i think the uselessness of poetry is most of its appeal. i guess my failing as a poet is that i can't consign myself to uselessness. i can't spend all day writing, and i can't spend all day in my head. (well, i mean i do, but i shouldn't encourage it.) that's what this whole law thing is about. useful activities make me feel better about the useless ones.
as for the term self-absorbed, i don't think it's necessarily pejorative. if, as de saussure may have said or i may be remembering it wrong, language is a social system and a psychological phenomenon, a self-absorbed writer is one who focuses more on the psychological phenomenon of language in her own head than on the social act of language as communication. but maybe introspective is a better term.
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