Art is not efficient

The Future Is Like Pie #11

Author

Lisa Maria Marquis
April 15, 2019

And I think now how so much of writing is NOT WRITING. The writing, the actual ACT of writing, is that iceberg tip, man. It’s just the part poking out of the water. But so much of writing is just thinking, and researching, and experiencing. It’s reading books. It’s living a life.

Because I studied design in college, I carried a fair amount of imposter syndrome with me into my graduate program in poetry. Who was I, after all, to be a writer—this art kid who understood kerning but not meter, color theory but not narrative theory, Mies van der Rohe but not bell hooks?

I should not have worried about this, for many reasons, but here’s one sentiment that got me through it: one of my poetry professors expressed total delight upon learning that I didn’t have a degree in English. “Thank god,” she said. “What good is writing poetry if you haven’t learned anything to write about?”

I think about that a lot. Not about poetry, specifically, but about anything. About practice: about what, of the world, we’re taking into our brains, and what, of our brains, we’re putting back into the world. We need to be multidisciplinary. We need to cross-pollinate. To be too singleminded, too dedicated to any one mode of thinking—no flowers lie that way.

That’s what’s on my mind on the eve of publication day. Everyday Information Architecture comes out tomorrow—a book about web design by a designer who became a poet who became a designer who became a poet again.

If you haven’t ordered your copy yet, please do! And if already have, any help in spreading the word online is deeply appreciated.

Celebrating my publication by sharing others’ publications:

“Thesmophoria” is an incredible essay by Melissa Febos about mothers and daughters, heroin, sex, and mythology:

It’s not that I should have told [my mother] everything—that would have been its own kind of cruelty—though I could have trusted her more. That younger version of our story, the one I’ve carried for most of my life, the one I’ve mostly told of here, is also true: I hurt myself, and I hurt her over and over. But like the matrifocal myth, there is another version, a wiser one. In it, Persephone is already home. Her time spent in the dark is not an aberration of nature, but its enactment.

You’ve probably heard about the architectural-monstrosity-slash-surveillance-device known as the Vessel; Kate Wagner exposes it expertly:

The Vessel betrays the fact that behind the glitzy, techno-urbanist facade of the Smart City™ lies the cold machinations of a police state. That architecture is used as live bait for these purposes is but one of many symptoms pointing to a field in a state of ethical decline.

My sister shared with me this transcript of T Bone Burnett’s SXSW keynote, which I found interesting for weaving together the music industry, the tech industry, our current sociopolitical climate, and (yes!) poetry:

The goal of technology is to create efficiency. The goal of art is to create conscience. Art is not efficient. Efficiency is not an attribute of the good. Efficiency can be efficient for good or evil, but as it has worked out in practice, efficiency would seem to be a prime attribute of evil. Without conscience, efficiency has the potential for apocalyptic evil.

I recently came across Dignity Matters, a Massachusetts nonprofit that provides girls and women in need with bras, underwear, and tampons and pads—absolutely crucial basics that are rarely donated to schools and shelters, and not covered by food stamps. Donate today, or look for a similar organization in your local area.

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