You take chicken, for example: maybe they couldn't figure out what to make chicken taste like, which is why chicken tastes like everything.
-Mouse in The Matrix
Craft
Last weekend, I was asked to judge for the Dukes of Ale’s State Fair Pro-Am Craft brew contest. It was fun, engaging, involved a lot of talking, sniffing, and tasting of beer, lots and lots of beer. As I was judging, I couldn’t help but think how slippery judging the aroma, appearance, flavor and mouthfeel of beer really is. Paired with another more “experienced” judge, we’d go through the requisite sticking our noses in the glass, holding the beer up to the light, and tasting it, then make notes, score it (each category was weighted differently (e.g. “flavor” was weighted much higher than the other categories, etc.) then talk about how we scored and if our final score was within 7 points of each other we’d average it to come up with a combined score and move on. Surprisingly, my scoring was “close enough” to the experienced judge with all but 2 beers through 18 samples and in fact much of our scoring was probably within 3 points of each other. So, by the end of the day besides feeling a little tipsy, I felt pretty confident in my subjective ability to judge beer. And yes, despite a long list of beer styles and how each one should manifest, it ultimately was a subjective experience we were engaged in. Yet, this experience is not much different than what we do with all art.
For example, a few years back I took a graduate level workshop with Gene Frumkin. Gene’s a really good teacher and a great poet, and sitting in a workshop with him opened my eyes to the different ways a poem can “work.” As he remarked at the beginning of class of what he was looking for, it pointed out how subjective judging poetry really was. Gene wanted poems and lines in poems to “surprise” him. A lot of my poems are narrative, so having lines that “surprise” while possible is also hard when there is clearly a story that is being told. Yet Gene, despite not necessarily seeing eye to eye a lot of time, didn’t judge my poetry as “bad poetry” even when it didn’t “surprise” him.
Judging beer or poetry and determining what is “good” and “bad” is very hard, if not impossible. Yet, I think there is a criteria for it that a lot of us recognize, and that criteria is actually pretty simple. The criteria that overwhelmingly is used to prescribe some sort of value on art is “craft.” For me, that manifests in my discussions with other poets about “intention.” As a poet I want to be deliberate with my language, having no extraneous or accidental words cluttering up the music of the line. Too often, I’m reading poems where everything seems about right and suddenly the poet throws the image, for example, of a dark cloud moving in to symbolize an emotional cloud and I’m “surprised” by the ease at which a cliché has suddenly found its way into an otherwise good poem.
Why do people rush to the familiar? Now, there is a possibility that perhaps when the poet started to really feel the pain of being jilted a storm coincidentally seemed to move in overhead. That would make the use of that particular image “authentic” and my guess is it would feel “authentic” and “crafted” but my nose knows when that’s not the case and I generally leave my experience of the poem a little saddened because the poet clearly wasn’t in control of their language, they weren’t exhibiting craft.
So if the stocks in trade in making a good beer are: proper, good ingredients; clean, sanitary conditions; proper heating and cooling; time; and care with the bottling/kegging procedures then doesn’t it stand to reason that there also stocks in trade that make a good poem? Yes, writing a good poem, essay, fiction, etc. can be taught. Craft can be taught.
But just because someone is “good” at craft doesn’t mean that they are creating art. For example, in the ‘80s guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen burst on to the Metal scene because of his technically proficient playing. As Steve Huey of AllMusic stated, “Yngwie Malmsteen is arguably the most technically accomplished hard rock guitarist to emerge during the '80s." But just because he is technically proficient doesn’t mean he’s creating great art.
There’s something else at play when great art is created; something that is not quite tangible. I tend to think it is a mixture (a very inexact mixture) of authenticity and craft. Maybe a poem is short on authenticity but long on craft; it might still be great art and I’d argue that’s what all these celebrated MFA programs are hoping for. I suspect administrators and faculty in MFA programs would argue, and some friends have argued, that the reason to pursue an MFA is because it affords you the time to write and offers a cohort of other serious writers to give constructive feedback. In short when you are studying art in the academy you are trying to get better at “craft.” Yet, I also think they are looking for something else and that is why many times getting into an MFA program involves applying to multiple programs and getting rejected by most of them. We might not know exactly what makes great art, but we have an idea. We recognize talent (or think we do). Yet, if it was clearly something that knowledgeable people recognized then why does one person get accepted into one program but rejected by another? Both can’t be right. Or can they?
In the next part, I want to talk about the state of arts education.
August 28, 2013