Joan Didion’s evasive essay, “Some Women,” which can be found in her new book, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, is about Robert Mapplethorpe, but it is also about the artistic search for truth. The title of the essay is so vague as to misdirect the reader. The principles found here can be applied to any creative and artistic practice—poetry included. I’ll argue here that Didion’s essay is a workshop in how to write a poem.
Didion explains that, in Mapplethorpe’s photographs, for instance, the subject wasn’t “herself” as such, but whoever Mapplethorpe wanted her to be. The subject of a photograph, essay, or poem, for that matter, is seldom the subject most directly mentioned. Take Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “The Fish” or Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, for that matter.
For example, it is better to not try to make the subject of writing the subject of one’s writing. I’ll try to describe how to write a poem, but I find that once I decide a particular piece of writing is about something, the writing is dead on arrival. Once I sit down with the intention to write a poem about something in particular, the poem disappears. Or, I’ll sit down to write about a particular subject and find by the end of the poem that the subject has eluded me entirely, but another subject has emerged, sometimes more compelling than the first. One train may indeed hide another.
About her early sittings with Vogue’s photographers, Didion explains: “there would be in each such photograph a ‘subject,’ the woman in the studio, and there would also be a subject, and the two would not necessarily intersect. This business of the subject is tricky.”
Oh yes, I tell myself. I’m going to write a whole book about death. And just like that, the book about death is…dead. Didion is wise to remind the writer or aspiring writer: “the attempt to analyze one’s work, which is to say to know one’s subject, is seen as destructive.”
Poetic truth is unique in that there is something there, but it cannot be paraphrased. Poetry contains truth, but what truth? Perhaps trying to explain the aboutness of a poem is like trying to observe a particle. It’s either a wave or a particle, but it can’t be seen as both at the same time.
Light passes through a camera lens. It is focused onto the camera’s sensor or onto a piece of film, and an image is created.
Reclining Man. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
Joan Didion writes that the person being depicted by the photographer was never the person herself, but “whoever and whatever it was that the photographer wanted to see.”
When I sit down to write a poem, I like to think that I’m writing about a subject, but what emerges is whatever the subject wants itself to be. Didion writes: “The business of the subject is tricky.”
Maybe I can tell you what a poem was all about after it is done, but to sit down and tell you what I plan to write would be foolish. Didion writes: “Gabriel Garcia Marquez once spoke to the New York Times about the “bad luck” that would befall him were he to discuss the novel he was writing; he meant of course that the novel would go away…” If I want my poetry to thrive, I’m better to not talk about it much.
I cannot tell you how to write a poem about anything because poems are not about things at all. I may have set out to become a writer because I wanted control of my subject, but a writer truly never has control of her subject, not if the work is to be thrilling, or full of potential. Maybe that’s why Mapplethorpe has faced so much recent revisionist criticism, like this piece in the New York Times. We want art to thrill with the possibility of what remains unsaid or unintended. Mapplethorpe controlled his subject matter, and while it was shocking for its time, the possibilities for his art are as tied up as his subjects.
And in a poem, so much of the poem’s vitality goes in what remains unsaid. Joan Didion’s essay “Some Women” is about the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and it is about Vogue and truth and photography. Mapplethorpe was famous for his BDSM photographs, and he died of AIDS in 1989. In the entire essay, Didion writes about truth, the nature of the seen and unseen, subject matter and viewer, but she doesn’t mention the AIDS epidemic. She doesn’t mention the fragility of life, a pressure that exerts itself around the essay itself. She mentions that Mapplethorpe may have been struggling with illness, and that is all.
How do you write a poem about death? How do you write an elegy? How do you write about the AIDS epidemic in the late 80s. Perhaps you write it by not writing about it at all, by turning away from the subject itself?
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, beat poet and author of A Coney Island of the Mind, passed away on Monday in San Francisco. He was 101 years old. Ferlinghetti holds a special place in my poet’s heart.
When I was 19 or 20, I had spent a whole summer working as a J.C. Penney lingerie girl (my very unglamorous job involved managing the cashier, putting bras and underwear on hangers, and directing the mostly-elderly clientele who visited our store to the more experienced lingerie girl who had been trained to measure bust size; I also had an affair with a very attractive man who drove a silver Mustang and worked in the juniors department; the plus-size dressing room and juniors room shared a hallway, and we had a lot of time to talk on Sundays when people trashed the place). But I digress. After spending the whole summer swimming in underwear and after the affair with the guy from juniors ended, I decided to take a flight to New York City. I would go there and see great art and read great writers. I would take Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind with me on the train to Babylon and I would travel to the edge of the manufactured world to stare into the ocean unchanged since the time of the Lenape.
I figured I’d do it on the cheap—sleep in subways, spend the days in museums, write in jazz clubs by night. My mother got wind of the idea and called the police on me. The police of course informed her that I was over 18 and could do whatever I wanted to do.
My friends had more sense and convinced me that I should maybe stay in a hostel and not sleep in subways, so I stayed in a hostel in Harlem for a few days, and one of my J.C. Penney friends knew someone who was running a methadone recovery house in a Park Slope basement and invited me to stay there. The family was in-between clients at the time, so I slept in a dark room with no windows for several days, ate barbeque with the artist who owned the brownstone, and talked about poetry with her lesbian daughter (I’d never seen a parent embrace her gay child), and it was beautiful. I got drunk at night, told my J.C. Penney friend I dreamed of living in New York, and she told me that all my dreams would come true. They did.
Otherwise, I spent the trip wandering the streets of New York, sitting in museums writing about the art, journaling late night in jazz clubs, and basically having a glorious time—the kind of time one can only have when one is 20, not serious, and in love with the city. I sat in a stairwell in the Whitney and a man with a camera photographed me. I had no idea who Bill Cunningham was at the time. Could he have been Bill Cunningham? That’s what I love about New York. Everyone is pressed together so close, the known and unknown, lovers and enemies, people who came to nothing, people who came to everything, and they walk through the streets breathing in the same air once breathed by the Salingers and the Ferlinghettis.
I carried only two books with me: J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind. I read them while riding the subway, or while sitting at the Lincoln Center trying to see angels in the fountain water.
I carried Ferlinghetti because he was, at the time, my idea of the ideal poet. He had written his way to the city, and then out west. He’d written himself a bookstore and a small press. He had written Allen Ginsberg into his life, and published his “Howl” and had gotten arrested for it. He’d written City Lights. He was what I hoped to be someday.
In Coney Island of the Mind, he compares modern humanity to the suffering humanity depicted in “Goya’s greatest scenes.” “We are the same people / only further from home / on freeways fifty lanes wide / on a concrete continent / spaced with bland billboards / illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness.” I read this and promised myself I would never embrace “imbecile illusions of happiness.”
Of course I went to Coney Island. My friend demanded it when she saw my copy of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind in my bag. So we took a flask and rode all the way to Coney Island, staring at the city’s “drunk rooftops” marveling at “its trees full of mysteries / and its Sunday parks and speechless statues” its “surrealist landscape” of “protesting cathedrals.”
Coney Island was disappointing. We ate hot dogs, and stumbled drunk through the sand. We didn’t swim. It was too cold.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind is a marvel, especially as I sit re-reading it today, in the wake of Ferlinghetti’s death. Coney Island of the Mind, 5, is a stunning poem about the crucifixion, which seems to be written in the voice of a Black man (I keep hearing Baldwin’s fiction in the voice; I’m reading Another Country), except at the heart of the poem is a lynching, and therefore a commentary on the racist south. So of course it would be attacked as “blasphemous” by a New York congressman.
The New York Times has written a beautiful obituary of Ferlinghetti. Ferlinghetti wrote that a poem “should arise to ecstasy somewhere between speech and song.” The Times explains that when he opened City Lights bookstore, he made a point to take the books other booksellers ignored and to have it serve as a kind of salon for the city. And then he published Ginsberg’s “Howl” under his City Lights press.
Allen Ginsberg. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
He writes in Coney Island of the Mind, “I have not lain with beauty all my life.” And the lines are a beautiful commentary on the powerful tastemakers of art, those “art directors” who “choose the things or immortality.” Ferlinghetti writes he has not lived with that rarified sort, but “made a hungry scene or two / with beauty in my bed / and so spilled out another poem or two.”
He sees Chagall: “Don’t let that horse / eat that violin / cried Chagall’s mother / But he / kept right on / painting.” Coney Island of the Mind is Ferlinghetti’s manifesto, one he stuck to.
The poetry is haunted by the ghost of Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire, with its “surrealist year” and its “surrealist landscape,” “and the mind its own illumination.” “Kafka’s Castle” “above the world.”
This is good stuff. This is poetry for the young. This is a poet falling in love with poetry and falling in love with language: “They pennycandystore beyond the El / where I first / fell in love.”
In time, Ferlinghetti became famous, but his early poetry has a radical tendency, not seeking after traditional acclaim. He writes: “Let us not wait for the write-up / on page one / of The New York Times Book Review … By the time they print your picture / in Life Magazine / you will have become a negative anyway.” Ferlinghetti was prescient.
I wrote poem after poem when I visited New York City that summer. I was still so young. There was still in me the sense of possibility of making great work, work that might change the world. I’m older now, and less sure. But Ferlinghetti reminds me why the work gets done. And it’s not for the Sunday write-up.
Ferlinghetti was always looking ahead. He saw Ginsberg before Ginsberg was the poet who wrote “Howl” and he made him the poet who had written “Howl.” He saw no place for poets to gather, so he made one. He saw no place for his friends’ poetry or books, so he made one. May I learn his life lesson well. And may we all someday “arise and go now / into the interior dark night / of the soul’s still bowery / and find ourselves anew / where subways and stall wait / under the River.”
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.
If you are looking to traditionally publish your poetry book, you’ll likely find yourself spending a great deal of money. Most small presses that publish poetry books charge reading fees for submission. These small presses often host “first book contests,” “second book contests,” or “open reading periods,” where writers submit their manuscripts. Many of the major first book and second book contests receive hundreds of manuscripts (800 to 1,000 manuscripts being submitted to a contest is not unheard of). Other small presses offer poets the opportunity to submit their work during open reading periods for a fee, where the press often won’t commit to publish a single manuscript from the pool of submissions. The cost to submit to these poetry book contests and open reading periods ranges from $25 to $30 per submission.
Shortly after I graduated from my M.F.A. in poetry from Columbia University, I found myself in the position of desperately needing to publish my poetry book (if you want to teach creative writing at the university level, you’ll need to have published at least one poetry book from a respectable small or medium-sized press). I also found myself in massive student loan debt and struggling to find work due to the 2008 financial crisis. Despite these challenges, I spent the first two years after graduate school submitting my work to many small presses publishing poetry books. If you understand the nature of publishing, you understand that in order to have a fair chance of publishing a poetry book (or publishing anything for that matter), you’ll have to submit your work to many places. When it comes to poetry, this means submitting your manuscript to dozens of small presses. I estimate I spent several thousands of dollars submitting my manuscript to first book contests. (Do the math: about 50 submissions at $25 to $30 each, plus the cost of mailing and printing…it was that late aughts, after all). After two years of doing this, I saw some minor success. My poetry manuscript was selected as a finalist for a couple of contests and I’d been nominated for a few small awards. But I still had no published poetry book, which meant that I couldn’t apply for university teaching jobs, making my expensive M.F.A. pretty much useless as far as pursuing my planned career path to be a tenured-track creative writing professor (now, the thought of me being a tenure-track creative writing professor sounds about as absurd as saying I want to be a professional surfer; I have to admit I sometimes think I probably would have had a better chance of being a professional surfer than poetry teacher if I’d started surfing as young as I’d started writing poetry—but I digress.)
The problem with publishing poetry books is this: the average poetry book doesn’t sell well. Small presses often have to rely on poetry reading fees just to survive. After all, if you aren’t selling 800 to 1,000 copies of every book of poetry you publish (and most small presses don’t), you’ll need to find a way to get income. $25 to $30 reliably coming from people who may not buy your poetry books, but who are willing to pay for you to read theirs is a pretty solid, but questionable, business model.
According to an article written by Rachel Mennies for The Millions, the average poet who has published one successful poetry book spent around $3,000 in contest submission fees before seeing success. In most cases, royalties and prize money wasn’t enough to recoup these costs. This is not surprising, given that most first book contests for poetry offer prizes under $5,000. And given the dismal state of poetry sales, especially in “academic” poetry, most writers cannot hope to make a living off of royalties. Most writers make a living as teachers, but again, having a published book is important to landing those jobs.
Poets don’t like to talk about money. No one goes into poetry for the money. I didn’t go into poetry to become rich as a poet. But the fact that submitting work costs money makes poetry only accessible to the wealthy or at least to those with some kind of disposable income.
This creates a system where poets who publish their work often can afford to do so. Mennies noted: “If a sizable majority of poets must spend money to secure publication for their books (and, ever increasingly, to submit to journals), and it’s uncertain whether or not those costs will be recouped upon publication, is the submission-fee model equitable for poets? By equitable, I mean accessible across, here, class: can a poorer or working-class poet submit her manuscript as often as a wealthy or institutionally supported poet? The data is unequivocal: no.” Because so many of the opportunities available to poets are contingent upon a first book, poorer poets are locked out of accessing institutional support (through tenure track jobs and residencies that rely on having a published book). They are locked out of job opportunities that rely on having that first book. And they often leave the field altogether.
I had to eventually stop submitting my work to poetry small presses. There came a point after the financial crisis where I had trouble affording groceries. I certainly didn’t have the discretionary income available to send out $25 poetry manuscripts to first book contests. Then I got divorced, had to leave Canada where I’d been living at the time, and found myself living out of a tent and a van. The thought of publishing a poetry book was the last thing on my mind, especially given the costs of submitting my work. It’s not that I stopped writing. It’s just that I stopped submitting.
I’ve recovered a great deal since then, but when I found myself recently with some discretionary income (not having to pay hundreds of dollars to my student loans every month thanks to the student loan deferrals due to COVID-19 gave me a little freedom to use my money creatively; an argument for student loan forgiveness; yes, even for Ivy League graduates, like me; though I’d be happy to see student loan forgiveness for state school attendees only, or forgiveness equivalent to the cost of attending state school; any relief is better than no relief), I decided not to submit my poetry manuscript to poetry contests. I decided to use it to start my own small press (Sphinx Moth Press) and publish my book (Relationship: A Poetry Book) in the process.
Poetry small presses struggle because they don’t often have government support, donor support, or enough people buying poetry books. I don’t think this model is inevitable. I believe that there are people who read poetry out there (look at how many people buy Rupi Kaur’s books!); I believe a small press willing to diversify its titles can sustain itself without the need for submissions fees.
Sphinx Moth Press won’t rely on a submission fee system. I want to make poetry publication a possibility for all poets. Sphinx Moth Press will ask that those poets who can afford to submit their work to paying contests support the press by becoming patrons of the press or support the press by buying our books.
Blood Owl. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
Sphinx Moth Press isn’t the only U.S.-based press that has an open reading period where writers can submit their work without paying a fee. Author’s Publish includes a list of presses (U.S., Canadian, Australian, and U.K.-based) that have open reading periods. When looking at this list, writers should also visit the submissions pages of the individual presses to learn more because many presses have restrictions about who can submit (cultural or regional), or to check to see whether these submissions policies may have been affected by COVID-19. They should also take the time to understand how the press promotes new authors and the work they publish. Many presses on the list are strong venues that offer real opportunities to new writers.
In the coming months, I’ll offer more updates. But for now, support poetry. Support independent artists and writers. We need it now more than ever.
(UPDATE 02/23/21: Author’s Publish has two pages which list presses that are open to free submissions. The most recent one is “90 Poetry Manuscript Publishers Who Do Not Charge Reading Fees.” Older ones include: “78 Poetry Manuscript Publishers Who Do Not Charge Reading Fees.” Authors should refer to the “90 Poetry Manuscript Publishers Who Do Not Charge Reading Fees,” as it appears to be the most up-to-date list on the website.)
So, you have a problem and you want to know how to solve it. I don’t really care what your problem is. We all have problems. Some are big problems, like climate change. The fact is that as I write this, Miami is sinking and one day alligators are going to be living in people’s second-story condos. Bill Gates likes to solve big problems like that (he wrote a whole book about it called How to Avoid a Climate Disaster). Some of us have ordinary problems, though. For example, my problems include not drinking enough water, having a lot of student loan debt (the government is only cool with bailing out Wall Street, not students, duh!), or trying not to lose my mind while my dog barks at the neighbors who are throwing out the trash for the tenth time this morning. My problems are stupid, I’m sorry. I know people are starving, facing eviction, dealing with trying to do spreadsheets while their Kindergartener does story time over Zoom, and sick from a global pandemic. I know.
Whatever your problem is, Bill Gates is really good at solving problems. He basically invented the personal computer. He’s also written a whole book about how to solve climate change called How to Avoid a Climate Disaster and if you want to know what I think about How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, you can read all that here. The thing that’s interesting about How to Avoid a Climate Disaster is that it gives you a glimpse into how Bill Gates solves problems. And that’s what I want to explore here.
How Bill Gates Solves Problems:
Be Ambitious. Bill Gates sets incredibly ambitious goals. In How to Avoid a Climate Disaster he lays out a plan about how we can get our emissions down to zero. Of course, many of the innovations that are required for this haven’t been invented yet. I think his logic runs along the lines of “aim for the stars, and if you miss, you either end up on the space station, or with a broken ankle, but either way, it’s better than not aiming high enough.”
Take the Time to Understand the Scope of the Problem. This can be really easy, sometimes, but it can also be really hard. Climate change is hard because there are so many ways that carbon gets into the atmosphere. Paying off debt can be hard because the cost of living is high, or you may not really know how you’re spending your money. For example, I need to stop buying so many books.
The Things You Don’t Notice, Matter. Bill Gates likes David Foster Wallace. I like David Foster Wallace, too. David Foster Wallace once told a story about fish who were swimming and one day one of the fish asks the other fish how he likes the water and the other fish is all confused because he’s like, dude, what’s water? Either way, for years I didn’t notice that I never drank enough water. I drank a lot of coffee, though. When I lived in Canada, I was working long hours, drinking three cups of coffee a day, but no water. And one day, while waiting for my coffee in a Starbucks, I literally passed out. No joke. One second I was standing waiting for my latte, and the next second I woke up on the ground. The manager had to call an ambulance, and in the hospital, the doctors put me on an I.V. Over the course of three hours, the nurses put into my body as much water as there should be in a human body. It turns out I was really, really dehydrated. Sometimes it’s easy to miss important details. Either way, I hear there’s a motivational water bottle that might be able to solve this problem for me.
Learn Things. The sign of wisdom is knowing what you do not know, or knowing that there is much you do not know. Bill Gates does a lot of research and talks to a lot of experts in How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. When trying to solve a problem, it helps to read up on the problem, or talk to other people. Bill Gates probably gets to talk to Michelle Obama. I wish I could talk to Michelle Obama. We can’t all talk to Michelle Obama, but we have friends or loved ones who might be willing to help us, (like my kind boyfriend who reminds me to drink water), or maybe there are people in our communities who are experts. Okay maybe they aren’t experts, but if they are kind, that counts too. We can call them or e-mail them and humbly ask for help, can’t we?
Create a Plan. You’d think that after I passed out in a Starbucks, I’d drink more water. Unfortunately, when it comes to solving problems, knowing you have a problem and even knowing how to solve it doesn’t always result in the problem getting solved. I knew I needed to drink more water, but kept forgetting. So eventually I had to just buy myself a measuring cup and drink out of that. And these days, I have a very kind, patient boyfriend, who kindly reminds me to drink water in the morning. It helps. Also having big glasses of water lined up across my desk helps. And making juices. Juices are wonderful.
Connect Everything Back to Big Goals. Bill Gates wants the world to stop putting any greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. This means going from 51 billion tons to zero. Gates writes: “I prefer to connect everything back to the main goal…” I think we are all wise to do this. When I was working to finally finish my book of poetry, everything I did related to that project had to tie back to the main goal. So whether it was working on this blog (I hope you’ll notice that I have a beautiful picture of Relationship: A Book of Poetry, on every page of this website; and if you haven’t gotten yourself a copy, please do; it helps me keep doing this work, and the book is, to borrow from Dave Eggers, a really awesome, heartbreaking work of staggering genius or at least a book of sad relationship poems that might make you cry yourself to sleep), or when I was painting trees, or typing my poems on a typewriter, or sitting in nature writing sad poetry, it all tied back to getting that book done. There’s a point to all this. Basically, it comes down to creating systems of success.
Try Lots of Things, and Remember That It’s Okay to Fail. Bill Gates knows that in order to end climate change, we’ll need to try all sorts of things. “We need to be exploring lots of ideas, even knowing that many of them will fail.” When it comes to solving problems, trying new things, and trying lots of things, and being okay with failing along the way, is really important.
Another Tip of the Iceberg. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
This is how I think Bill Gates solves problems based on what I’ve read in How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. Inc also says that Gates asks himself these two questions: “Who has dealt with this problem well? And what can we learn from them?” There are probably other things he does too. If Bill has anything to add, I’d be happy to hear it. And if he can tell me how Michelle Obama remembers to drink water, I’d like to hear that advice, too.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.
Bill Gates’s recent book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster is both timely and late. Late, in that, according to Eco Watch, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology warned Lyndon B. Johnson more than 50 years ago that carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere would “almost certainly cause significant changes” and “could be deleterious to the future of human beings.”
50 years ago.
And it is timely in that we finally have a president in office who believes climate change is real and who wants to join the global conversation about the real climate disaster we face. Climate activism has gone viral. There’s Greta Thunburg. There is the excellent journalistic work of Elizabeth Kolbert and others. If I think of my work as a writer, I consider bearing witness to our climate disaster one of the most important things I do. I see it in bleaching coral reefs in Hanauma Bay in Hawai’i, in beaches that disappear overnight when the tides are high on the North Shore, in rising sea levels that have put my home town of Miami underwater on sunny days, and in massive hurricanes that destroyed the infrastructure of Puerto Rico, my grandma’s birthplace.
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster is not a perfect book, but the book is incredibly helpful if you’re a lay reader trying to understand the scope of the climate crisis and trying to really understand the vast changes our world will need to make in order to solve this problem. Gates does an excellent job of explaining how ubiquitous fossil fuels are in every aspect of our lives, pointing out that gas costs about as much as soda (unless you live in California or Hawai’i). The world pumps out about 51 billion tons into the atmosphere every year. Cars and planes only account for about 16% of these total emissions. Construction products, like cement, account for 31 percent, our electricity accounts for another 27 percent, and growing food accounts for another 19 percent. A smaller percentage (seven percent) goes to heating, cooling, and refrigeration. We will need to address how we do each of these things if we are to solve our climate crisis and avoid a climate disaster. These numbers are a little misleading, though. While transportation only accounts for 19 percent of the total source of global emissions, transportation accounts for the leading cause of emissions produced by the U.S., largely due to transportation, but also due to shipping. So, despite what Gates says, Americans still need to focus on how they drive and fly and ship things from place to place.
The Atlantic recently published a story by Peter Brannen that should be read by everyone on the planet. Brannen uses scientific evidence to take us back in time to the Earth the last time there was as much carbon in the atmosphere as there is now. What did the earth look like when the atmosphere contained about 400 parts per million of carbon?
“The Amazon is running backwards…” Oregon is unrecognizable, “flowing with rivers of incandescent rock.” Brannen takes us further back in time, to the atmosphere we are projected to create for ourselves, a world where swampy rainforests grew lush in the Arctic. It takes the earth and animals time to catch up with these changes. And the carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere today doesn’t go away; it can stick around for more than 10,000 years, Gates notes.
Brannen’s message is this: the changes we are seeing now are just the beginning, and because we are still pumping carbon into the atmosphere, we won’t even begin to see the more radical changes for years to come. But if the Earth’s geological history is any indication—change is coming, and it doesn’t look good.
In How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Gates writes that we need to get our greenhouse gas emissions down from fifty-one billion to zero. Gates might sound ambitious, but after reading Brannen, Gates’s project may not be ambitious enough. For context, during the COVID-19 pandemic, economic slowdowns only reduced carbon emissions by five percent. The fact that the massive economic pain of shutting down and not moving for weeks on end only took the world’s emissions down to about 49 billion tons truly reveals the scope of the problem.
Tip of the Ice Berg. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
As I’ve written before in this blog, I’m grateful that Gates is trying to solve the climate problem. I wish more ridiculously wealthy people would put their money and energy into solving problems like climate change, poverty, education, and health. When it comes to a problem as big as climate change, we need all hands-on deck. We need wealthy people to invest in clean energy and we need to fund projects that will benefit the environment. We need scientists doing research to create cleaner options. We need politicians with the courage and the will to make difficult decisions, and to put in place policies, and laws that will motivate change. We need young people like Greta Thunburg, using their platforms to give a voice to the planet. If more wealthy people were like Gates, we’d be living in a better world.
But there were moments in this book that deeply disappointed me. For one, I was saddened to learn that Gates only fully accepted that greenhouse emissions were a real problem as late as 2006. He writes that before then, he “assumed that there were cyclical variations or other factors that would naturally prevent a true climate disaster.” And yet, perhaps his “late conversion” admission might help others slower than him take a second look at the science. I can be disappointed and still appreciate his bravery in admitting he took a long time to come around.
I also don’t know what a climate change expert will say when he reads that Gates writes: “‘Weather for Dummies’ is the best book on weather that I’ve found.” That said, I still might find myself buying a copy of Weather for Dummies, either way.
Already experts are quibbling with Gates. Bill McKibben, who writes the Climate Crisis newsletter for the New Yorker, reviewed How to Avoid a Climate Disaster for the New York Times, and disputed Gates’s claim that wind and solar couldn’t solve the climate disaster, noting that the price of solar is lowering and so are the prices of storage batteries that would make these sources of energy viable when the “wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine.”
Here’s one thing for certain. Gates understands that money runs the world and more importantly, he understands how money runs the world. We can’t solve the climate disaster by policy alone. We can’t just tell people in developing countries that they can’t have electricity because coal is harming the planet. Gates writes: “The only solution I could imagine was to make clean energy so cheap that every country would choose it over fossil fuels.”
Pitting economics and politics against one another creates a false dichotomy and a zero-sum game for our climate disaster that doesn’t exist. Gates’ solution is multifaceted. We will need to make clean energy cheap, but we’ll also need policy to make that happen. Politicians can incentivize clean energy by taxing dirty energy (and carbon-heavy products) so the costs actually reflect the cost to our planet. This means investing in clean energy (research in particular), and choosing not to invest in dirty energy like coal and oil. Investment in clean energy on the private and public scale would mean there would be more research, and more people able to explore the problem. Right now money wants to support the status coal.
Gates himself notes that we need government intervention to increase investment in research and development for cleaner energy, and for other climate change initiatives that may not be supported by the private sector. He notes that we spend only around 0.02 percent of the global economy researching and funding clean energy initiatives. The fact that the most pressing problem of our lifetimes gets less than one percent of the global economy says a great deal about our culture, what we prioritize, and how far we need to go. Gates argues that the government should invest in the bolder and riskier ideas that have the potential to solve a bigger chunk of the problem, because private investors won’t likely invest in them.
I am not a politician nor economic expert nor climate scientist, but these just seem like common sense solutions that jump out to me as obvious. In fact, before even reading the book, I drafted some of them out as possible solutions, and was pleased to see Gates was thinking along the same lines.
Gates reports that “Even America’s investment in energy research was (and still is) far lower than in other essential areas, like health and defense.” We need government to improve our infrastructure so that we can deliver clean energy from places with sun and wind to places that may not have these things. Gates notes that “transmission and distribution are responsible for more than a third of the final cost of electricity.” We will need strong leaders to promote better infrastructure projects, require carbon capture in industry, and provide the financial incentives to make these projects possible.
And Gates notes that the private sector doesn’t invest in green tech because “returns were so low. They were used to investing in biotechnology and information technology, where success often comes quickly and there are fewer government regulations to deal with.” You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to know that money isn’t always forward thinking or able to delay gratification.
Gates is wise to restrict the book to the domains he knows—technology, investment, business. How to Avoid a Climate Disaster is not necessarily the full answer to the problem it promises to be (we’ll need experts, too), but it offers a detailed (and readable) explanation of the problem, and this is useful. One thing is for sure: we’re not going to solve the climate disaster if we keep having partisan conversations. Gates offers an approach that can appeal to someone who may be more conservative, and given that we live in a world where money guides political policy, we need someone to bridge the partisan divides that make progress impossible.
Gates looks at the big-picture problems in How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. This isn’t a feel-good book about how you can live a greener life. But after reading the book, there were some important new things I discovered about how I could personally be greener in my daily life, and some were surprising. If you read the book closely, you’ll see ways you can help. For example:
Reduce Food Waste. Gates notes that food waste alone in the United States contributes immensely to our climate disaster. “When wasted food rots, it produces enough methane to cause as much warming as 3.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year.” My boyfriend and I make a point to buy the “older vegetables” on sale at the store and at the market. They may not be pretty, but they are inexpensive and they reduce food waste.
When buying your next car, if you can afford it, buy electric.
Travel less, drive less; walk, bike, and swim more.
Switch to an electric heat pump to heat and cool your home. Use energy efficient appliances, and if you can, switch to a green pricing program that uses green sources to power your home (it may cost a little more).
Solving our climate challenges won’t be easy. We won’t be able to solve this problem in a way that won’t involve sacrifice from us all: from business, governments, and people. Government needs to ask business to pay more taxes and play a greater role in carbon capture and infrastructure-building. Government leaders may need to make hard decisions. Businesses and investors need to stop focusing entirely on the bottom line and think about how their actions affect people and the environment. People may need to change their behavior and diets (less travel and less food waste and less meat eating for one).
If you’re looking for easy ways that you can live a greener life by reading Bill Gates’s How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, you’ll be disappointed (Gates cares more about the big picture). But if you’re looking for a book to help you understand the scope of the problem so that you can demand more of yourself, your leaders, and the companies from which you buy things—this is a great read.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.
Poetry books about love are popular because love poetry encompasses the full spectrum of human emotions. Love poems are about hope, fear, anger, joy, and excitement; they are about lust; they sometimes flatter, sometimes betray, sometimes seduce, and are sometimes jealous. Poetry books about love can also be about patience, kindness, and the search for truth. They can be about perseverance, sacrifice, and trust. They can be about the immense absence left by the beloved.
As a poet who has recently published her own poetry book about love: Relationship: A Poetry Book, I’ve been thinking about both classic and more recent poetry books about love. For over a decade now, I have been reading, writing, and thinking about poetry. While earning my M.F.A. from Columbia University, I read a range of poets and poetry books, including poetry books about love. What did I discover? What are some of the most popular poetry books about love (based on the best selling books of all time, and more recent poetry best sellers)? Let’s take a closer look below.
Poetry Books About Love: The Classics
What are some of the classic poetry books about love? Here are some of the most enduring. Check them out:
Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy & Vita Nuova
Gustave Dore, Paradiso Canto 31, Creative Commons
When Dante was writing the Vita Nuova, which was basically one of the first hybrid books of prose and poetry ever written, he not only included all the courtly love poems he had written to seduce all the ladies in Florence (Dante got around), but also used the book as an opportunity to declare his undying love for Beatrice. Unfortunately, Beatrice dies. At the end of the Vita Nuova, Dante declares that he will write what has never been written of any woman. It takes him years to do it, but when he does, he has written perhaps one of the most famous books of poetry ever written and one of the most famous poems–period: The Divine Comedy. Everyone reads the Inferno, but Dante followed up the Inferno with the Purgatorio and the Paradiso. If you just read the Inferno, you’ll most likely miss the fact that you’re reading a love poem. Beatrice is a passing mention in the opening cantos (basically, she sends her dead buddy, Virgil to help Dante get through hell), but if you really want to see Dante’s undying love for Beatrice, you’ll have to read on. Dante has to pass through hell to see Beatrice, but he doesn’t get to see Beatrice at the end of the Inferno. All we get at the Inferno’s end is the devil. To get to one of the most romantic scenes in all of poetry, you’ll have to read the Purgatorio through to the end, and if you want to see Dante spend time with Beatrice, read on to the Paradiso. In writing about his love for Beatrice, Dante explores all the ways that love can go wrong (basically the themes of the Inferno and the Purgatorio), but he also explores all the ways love can go right. These are stunning poetry books about love, undying.
William Shakespeare’s Sonnets
William Shakespeare. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
William Shakespeare’s sonnets offer some of the most classic love poems of all time. The best part is that they explore the full range of human emotions. Basically, the thesis of all these poems is this: if you want your love to really live forever, you need to have a kid. Your child will carry the legacy of your love forward because people grow old and get ugly. But, more than that, Shakespeare questions some of the cliches about the need for the lover to be perfect (see sonnet 130: “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.”)
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Pablo Neruda
Paradiso Two, Bread of Angels. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
Pablo Neruda’s love poetry is stunning. If you can read the originals in Spanish, that would be best, but even in translation, the plainspoken truth rings through these exquisite poems about love. “Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines” is probably the best poem about heartbreak ever written. The bare simplicity of the language, the purity of thought, and the immense weight of the man’s heartbreak is enough to make you want to cry yourself to sleep.
Sonnets from the Portuguese and Other Poems, Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Yellow Bee. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
If you’ve ever read the famous poem that starts “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways?” you’ve read Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It’s probably the most famous love poem ever written. Need I say more?
If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, translated by Anne Carson
Anne Carson is one of our best living poets. Anyone who reads Carson knows that she is steeped in the classics. Sappho’s poetry dates back to the seventh century B.C. Mostly the poems exist in fragments, with Columbia College noting that only about 40 fragments of her poetry survive. Sappho is known for her poetry written to other women, leading many to write that she was the first lesbian poet, but we know nothing about her life, save the few fragments that remain. Sappho is one of the first true love poets and one of the first legendary female poets to write lasting lyrics.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.
Joan Didion’s newest book, “Let Me Tell You What I Mean,” like all non-fiction, searches for a kind of truth that exists outside the thing itself. We tell stories to discover the truth. At least, as a writer, I have used storytelling to uncover what truths I can. Truth is often elusive, and so we write stories to chase the truth, as if it can be found in the finality of a period, or in the process of a clause unfolding. Didion’s truth is a narrative truth. When Didion writes about a photographer, she is not writing about photography or even really about the photographer himself, but about a particular kind of truth a photographer can tell. The pear is a pear, but it is also the fact of the pear as it fits into the narrative of the specific that makes Didion’s descriptions work. When Didion writes about Robert Mapplethorpe in 1989, she is writing about his death, but also not writing about death. “The business of the subject is tricky.” And indeed it is. Didion knows that just as Mapplethorpe’s photographs told us more about Mapplethorpe than they told us about his subjects, so will anything Didion writes about Mapplethorpe tell us more about Didion than anything else.
What’s so remarkable about Didion is her constant newness, even when the essays date back to the sixties. 2021 America may seem light years away from Didion’s 1968 essay about the underground press. But when you see that the book opens with an essay about the 1968 underground press and closes with a 2000 essay about the various unofficial Martha Stewart websites (my favorite: ‘Gothic Martha Stewart’ “which advises teenagers living at home on how they can ‘goth up’ their rooms without alarming their parents”).
When Didion writes about her mistrust about newspapers in 1968, she comments upon the early seeds of distrust in the media that would someday give birth to the full-blown abominations of “fake news.”
Hilton Als, in his introduction to Didion’s “Let Me Tell You What I Mean,” (and I feel like I need to mention Als because his introduction makes up about 20% of the words in this very short book) explains that Didion’s truth is ever-evolving, because in a living writer, the story is ever-evolving. “…if her nonfiction work is synonymous with anything , says Didion in work after work, it is with the idea that the truth is provisional, and the only thing backing it up is who you are at the time you wrote this or that, and that your joys and biases and prejudices are part of writing too.”
Didion’s “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” is a short book. Holding it feels like holding an 8-track, something pulled out of a box that hadn’t been opened since the 70s. And indeed, many of these pieces herald from the late 60s and 70s. The book is new. It presents Didion’s uncollected pieces, but it is old, too. A time capsule, but a unique one, with more recent additions.
Time capsules can be dated things, but Didion’s writing never feels dated. What makes a writer like Herman Melville, Leo Tolstoy, or Virginia Woolf, or Joan Didion feel urgent, even if their work was created in another era? Didion indeed heralds from another era—the era of print, before all this internet. Als notes that it is a writer’s ability to “shed a sort of awful and beautiful light on a world we half see but don’t want to see, one where potential harm is given, the bogeyman may be your father, and hope is a flimsy defense against dread.”
In her essay “A Trip to Xanadu,” Didion writes about William Randolph Hearst’s San Simeon, conjuring Coleridge’s poem, “Kublah Khan” in the process. The essay is about how a rich man might try to build a mansion to avoid facing his own existential dread “the one dark fear we all know about.” Extravagant expenditures of money are “dedicated to the proposition that all the pleasures of infinity are to be found in the here and now.” Didion takes the tour. She listens to the guides tell their legends in “a tone reflecting the idolatry of the rich that so often accompanies the democratization of things, the flattening out.” In a world of Kardashians and Real Housewives, I think Didion’s commentary is worth noting. There’s an Americanness in indulging in material pleasure; it’s perhaps the only real American religion—the idea that immediate pleasure and consumption can erase all human ills. San Simeon is America itself: “The spirit of San Simeon was inhibited by nervous adult distinctions about what was correct and what was not, what was good and what was less good, what was “art” and what not: if William Randolph Hearst liked something he bought it, and brought it to San Simeon.”
The uncanny and the dreadful is embedded in reality itself, in our essential aloneness, in our dread of death, but it is also the truth one discovers in one’s own words. Didion writes: “The peculiarity of being a writer is that the entire enterprise involves the mortal humiliation of seeing one’s own words in print.” I have experienced this particular “mortal humiliation” again and again, and yet somehow I have kept going, kept writing. The fixed nature of the written word is an epitaph. It is one’s own epitaph.
What we write has the power to undo us, to reveal the awful truth, whatever it might be. Didion sits in on a Gambler’s Anonymous meeting in her essay “Getting Serenity” and finds herself troubled by the whole affair, particularly by the way the participants continue to assert their “powerlessness” and then later, their “serenity.” Didion ultimately leaves the room running, writing, “…serenity… is a word I associate with death, and for several days after that meeting I wanted only to be in places where the lights were bright and no one counted days.” Didion constantly seeks life, messy life in all its permutations. But maybe she runs away from the bare frank room where there is no room for American escapism.
There are many delights in Didion’s Let Me Tell You What I Mean. Didion is ahead of her time in so many things: from the unreasonable pressures placed on teenagers to get into the right college, to the wonderful David Foster Wallace-esque moment where Didion, writing about Nancy Reagan, notices the media watching Nancy: “we seemed to be on the verge of exploring certain media frontiers: the television newsman and the two cameramen could watch Nancy Reagan being watched by me, or I could watch Nancy Reagan being watched by the three of them, or one of the cameramen could step back and do a cinema verité study of the rest of us all watching and being watched by one another.”
The writer is always watching, but it is her job to watch more closely than anyone else. It is Didion alone who noticed the noticing cameras, and who also noticed that the revelatory moment of noticing was passed over. The cameramen ultimately agree that the best thing would be to “watch Nancy Reagan picking some flowers in the garden.” And of course, it’s perfect. Nancy needs flowers. Everyone is smiling. Didion notices: “We had all been smiling quite a bit that morning.” And I think back to David Foster Wallace’s long digressions on the particular existential dread he felt when given a professional smile, or worse, when he was denied a professional smile in a retail interaction. And indeed Didion is a step ahead of Wallace here in 1968: “Nancy Reagan has an interested smile, the smile of a good wife, a good mother, a good hostess, the smile of someone who grew up in comfort and went to Smith college and has a father who is a distinguished neurosurgeon.”
Didion’s super power is the power to notice. She notices “there on the coffee table in the living room lie precisely the right magazines for the life being portrayed.” She notices Nancy Reagan, at a time when women like Nancy Reagan were becoming obsolete, even as women were escaping the boundaries of being unnoticeable and joining the workforce.
Als notes that it takes time to tell the truth. The real writer sticks around with the half-formed truths long enough to get them right.
In her masterpiece of a lecture, “Why I Write” Didion notes: “In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying, listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act…there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of the secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.”
Imposition… on private space. This transgression is in the act of writing. It is also an act of intimacy. Many writers struggle to hold normal conversations, saving their real conversations for the page. I know, I hardly talk.
Didion writes that she writes to discover. What’s beautiful about reading Didion’s work is that we get to discover the world right along with her.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.
I didn’t see Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s “Fleabag” before the pandemic struck, though I saw that it won a ton of Emmys, and I took note. Back in the days before pandemic, I didn’t have much time for television. How things have changed!
I saw “Fleabag” over the past weekend, curled up in bed, sometimes laughing hysterically, but more often crying. I cried in awe at Waller-Bridge’s genius, humor, and ability to capture a particularly female version of unrequited lust and sexual frustration. I also cried because the show is incredibly moving, sad, and existentially precise.
There’s something truly literary about “Fleabag.” You get the feeling that you’re watching Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde, and Fran Lebowitz come into their own all at once. Joan Didion writes about “the inability of all of us to speak to one another in any direct way” and I wonder if I’m the only one who feels similarly incapable during the pandemic. What is so moving about Fleabag, a character who makes herself at once hateful and charming at the same time? Perhaps it’s Fleabag’s inability to be direct with anyone in her life other than the camera (she frequently breaks the fourth wall, to confide in us, her viewers), or maybe it was the false sense of intimacy that occurs when the fourth wall is broken. I miss having friends in my living room. After a few episodes, Fleabag felt like a friend.
What I found remarkable was Waller-Bridge’s ability to capture the sense of our essential aloneness, the loneliness of modernity, the isolation of what it means to be alive in 2020 and 2021 (even though the show was filmed in pre-pandemic times), and the aloneness that comes about when one tries to live life authentically, if not always well.
This sense of aloneness has crept upon me from time to time. At times it has slipped through the shadows of the reef at Hanauma Bay when I snorkeled there alone—no, the shadow was not quite a shark, or the bleaching coral of climate change, but something more existential and horrifying—the sense that I could be swept out to sea and no one would know for days or weeks that I was gone because there was no one to know. And sometimes the aloneness was a brute reality that slammed into me like a foul ball. I can remember with distinct clarity the feeling of sitting alone in a basement in Toronto after my husband and I split up, the force of the aloneness pulling me down into despair, as I shuffled through our old photos. I can recall the feeling of aloneness I felt when I found myself lost on a road in Kentucky after my Canadian visa expired. I drove in circles for hours, surrounded by people, but unable to stop and ask for directions.
Am I the only one who has felt alone in this way? “Fleabag” suggests that I am not alone, at least not alone in my feeling of aloneness, and there is comfort in that. For me, the last episode of season one is probably one of the most remarkable pieces of television produced in quite a while, precisely because it captures a kind of existential loneliness that only late capitalism could produce.
At the end of season one Fleabag’s best friend is dead (by suicide, after stepping in front of a bike after learning that her boyfriend had slept with someone else; we learn that the someone else is Fleabag herself, and the unspeakable nature of this guilt is the driving force that separates Fleabag from everyone around her). Fleabag’s pathetic on and off again boyfriend finally leaves her for good. Her sister chooses to believe her own terrible husband’s version of events rather than hers (that sleazy man drunkenly kissed her, dammit, not the other way around as he alleges!). She goes to see her father, the last person in her life, but he tells her she needs to leave (Fleabag has insulted and angered his girlfriend, again). The only person left in her life is her pet gerbil and banker.
Madonna. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
Perhaps what I found most horrifying about the end of “Fleabag” was how precisely it captured what it felt like to be truly alone. I saw in Fleabag myself—those times in my life when I somehow managed to burn everything to the ground and cut ties with everyone—lovers, family, friends. That feeling, that precise feeling of aloneness, is what “Fleabag” captures in its pure genius.
Here we are, on the verge of the pandemic ending. Am I the only one who feels incapable of holding a real conversation anymore? Am I the only one who feels like every social connection I still have hangs on by the most tenuous of threads, that might be severed at any moment by wind or disease or misunderstanding or rage or boredom? Am I the only one who sees how fragile this whole enterprise really is? Fleabag says I am not alone, and maybe that’s enough for me.
In “Fleabag,” there’s no escape from the existential dread of being alone. Success at work won’t get you out of it (look at Fleabag’s rich and successful sister who makes millions but hates her life). Throwing yourself into your own doomed project won’t help either (Fleabag sits in her gerbil café, weighed down by the silence). Sex and God won’t save you from the aloneness, either. In season two, Fleabag manages to seduce a priest (the ultimate conquest, really), resulting in what is probably one of the hottest scenes of television ever produced. The prospect of God haunts the show at the perimeter (are we God? Is she talking to the spirit?), and then at the very center, where God literally comes between Fleabag and the only man in the whole show with whom she’s had any real sexual and intimate connection. Sex won’t save Fleabag either. Sex erases the possibility of spiritual connection with God, church, or even friendship with a priest, the only character I see as having the potential to get through to her.
Fleabag envisions a world of zero-sum social games. Of course, the priest must choose between God and love. Of course. Lust satisfied is just that—lust satisfied. It is not connection—any more than Fleabag’s “Chatty Wednesdays” at her café seem to bring anyone closer. And yet, Fleabag keeps trying.
Much has been written about Fleabag’s breaking the fourth wall, and the Priest’s noticing this break. It creates a real sense of the uncanny, and brings almost a sense of spirituality and mysticism to the show. Who, exactly, is Fleabag talking to? Is it us? Is it her dead friend? Is it the creative process itself with which she engages? It is herself? Is it God? The only true intimacy we truly get in the show is this break—it’s the intimacy forged through the creative act of telling one’s own story, however ugly and hard it might be. Fleabag turns her misfortunes into comedy, and they are also deeply moving.
Fleabag envisions a world where every connection requires the complete sacrifice of other connections. Fleabag’s world is one of zero sum social games. The only world where the zero sum game doesn’t exist is in the creation of one’s own life, in the moment where the fourth wall is broken, and we find ourselves face to face with our essential aloneness and also with our essential selves.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.
Jaron Lanier’s “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now” includes, among his ten arguments, the argument that social media is destroying your free will and that quitting social media is the best way you can resist “the insanity of our times.” I don’t really need ten arguments to spend less time on social media. I feel insane enough as it is without the bots feeding me content designed to make me feel more insane. Instagram Gods, if you send me one more post about the “habits that are destroying your mental health,” I promise I’ll delete you right now.
The less I post and the less time I spend there, the happier I am. I haven’t quite brought myself to quit altogether because I do find that social media works more like a thermometer, allowing me to gauge the “temperature” of the culture. Is today politically “hot” or “cold?” Is there finally a new episode of “This is Us” on Hulu that will give me an excuse to sob uncontrollably while eating ice cream? Social media has the answers. But when it comes to trying to find inspiration, true creativity, art, and poetry, social media is the last place I’d look; I don’t look for inspiration on social media, because it doesn’t promote creativity; it kills it.
Lanier makes the argument that social media killed writing and investigative journalism because of the rise of clickbait. “Everyone, including journalists, is forced to play the optimization game…” How many online magazines have devolved into mindless top ten articles that offer neither substance nor novelty?
If you look at the art being “liked” on social media, it often involves some combination of naked women (or half-naked women), the macabre, or fantasy creatures presented in various poses. Now, I do know that the history of art was built on naked women, the macabre, and fantasy creatures in various poses (the Sistine Chapel includes all of the above); it’s just that the work on social media somehow lacks an effable quality. I’d refer to this as “soul,” spirit, or what Federico García Lorca called “duende.” It’s one thing to look at a painting of an angel made by someone inspired by trancelike psalms, hymns, and incense, and another thing to look at a picture of an angel made by a person serving the almighty algorithm. The naked women of Instagram are no “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” but rather cruder and cruder attempts to appeal to the lowest common denominator—that little heart on the bottom of the screen. There is no memento mori in the macabre of Instagram, only the nihilistic quest for the ever-elusive “like.”
Worse is when artistic creation becomes merely advertisement, the art itself marketing material and product all at once. In Fran Lebowitz’s “Pretend It’s a City,” the great critic and humorist makes the astute observation that when a Picasso goes for sale at the auction houses the crowd is silent. The crowd only applauses once the piece has been sold and the price announced. What are they applauding? The art or the price? I understand that artists need to self-promote and that social media is a great place to promote one’s work. When the self-promotion is self-aware, I can stomach the social media performance. But when the self-promotion becomes an end in itself, I die a little inside, and I think the creative soul dies a little too.
The Instapoet is no better. The poetry ranges from low platitude, to the banal cliché, to the barely silent fart. The most popular poems are as short as limericks, but hardly as profound. What people call poetry on Instagram is often relationship advice or those sad inspirational quotes teachers used to put up on the wall in your math class with pictures of men in speedos diving into a pool, or men with backpacks climbing mountains in silhouette (it was always, always, men). The whole project sounds appealing in concept, but in practice, it leaves one doom scrolling through a hundred posts about how one can better serve the capitalist machine by being more productive, happy, or brave.
Art and poetry deal in more refined neurotransmitters like serotonin and oxytocin, not in dopamine, the elixir of addiction. Social media appeals to the creative quick fix, the feeling of having consumed something profound without any of the labor that often accompanies profound experience. To truly see a Vermeer, one must stand close to it, and then far away. Then, observe the profound subtleties of light, while wondering about the mysteries of the people being depicted, all the while wondering whether it might just be the product of the camera obscura, after all. To see a piece of Instagram art, one need only “like.”
What does it mean to “like” a poem or work of art on Instagram? When critical reception is reduced to such crude binaries, what does this do to taste, to culture? Lanier writes: “Feedback is a good thing, but overemphasizing immediate feedback within an artificially limited online environment leads to ridiculous outcomes.”
Lost Bee. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.
Lanier argues that social media is manipulating us and destroying how society works, but it is also destroying art and creativity. When the instant gratification of social media opens the avenues for work to be instantly appraised in seconds by dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of followers and strangers proffering their “likes” or weighty silence, artists are more likely to create work that appeals to the quick appraisal and approval, and fail to create work that requires more pause, more thought. Lanier notes: “What if listening to an inner voice or heeding a passion for ethics or beauty were to lead to more important work in the long-term, even if it measured as less successful in the moment?” The work that often endures isn’t always widely popular right away, but is discovered slowly, and sometimes over a long period of time. And perhaps having the most readers or followers doesn’t always translate into the most value. What if you meaningfully reached only a few people, but actually changed their lives?
On social media, the commodity is the “like.” Likes are virtually free, only taking up our time, but to receive more of them is a strange and empty kind of wealth.
Lanier holds that social media makes people addicted. They become addicted to the dopamine rush of instant approval. Artwork created in this environment, where it is meant to be quickly consumed and dissolved into the forgotten past or at least until the next post, cannot thrive or survive. I make art because I want it to endure, not because I want the pressure cooker of having to post a new piece every day in order to keep my hungry followers happy.
“The addict gradually loses touch with the real world and real people,” writes Lanier.
When I started posting poetry on Instagram, I thought it would serve as a motivation to get me to write. It worked, but I also found myself obsessed with data, watching the demographics of people who chose to “like” my poetry, watching the demographics of those who chose to follow me (young women, mostly; actually young women, only—when it came to my poetry). When I pursued a more robust experiment, where I promoted a poetry post, I learned even more. Young women are the main consumers of online poetry; virtually no men responded to my promotion (was this because the algorithm only showed my work to women? Or because men were genuinely uninterested?). I don’t post much poetry online anymore because I found that the worst poems I wrote were most liked. This instant critical evaluation, I realized, would only have a negative effect on my work.
I’m lucky. I’ve been writing for over a decade. I know when something is bad for me and my writing. But young poets don’t have experience or the understanding to understand that risk-taking work may not be liked, but is the most important work you’ll do because you’ll grow from it. Lanier notes: “When people get a flattering response in exchange for posting something on social media, they get in the habit of posting more.” When young artists confuse a proliferation of likes for the merit of their art, they fail to grow, fail to evolve, and fail to produce challenging work. Pick up any book by an Instapoet and you’ll see what I’m talking about. (Or check out my review of Rupi Kaur’s work, here and here).
What if the best thing for creative life is to create for a while with no one really seeing or judging your work? Lanier writes about this fact about social media as “the inability to carve out a space in which to invent oneself without constant judgement.”
Social media also tends to promote negative emotion, because negative emotion sells. Art and poetry that promotes sympathy, respect, empathy, and compassion is not going to end up in the feed. But art and poetry that feeds on fear, hostility, anxiety, jealousy, repulsion, and ridicule will be promoted. What happens when we consume art stewed in fear and anger alone, rather than embracing the full spectrum of human emotion.
Lanier writes that “if you want to motivate high value and creative outcomes, as opposed to undertaking rote training, then reward and punishment are not the right tools at all.” The easy likes, or the pain of being ignored—this is not what makes creativity or art. Creativity and art dwells in community, but it also dwells in a space where there isn’t always instantaneous feedback.
There is nothing on social media that fosters “joy, intellectual challenge, individuality, curiosity” or other elements of the human experience that can’t fit into the algorithm. When we turn art making into an experiment led by B.F. Skinner, we’re all more likely to become more like Pavlovian dogs, drooling at bells, rather than searching for meaning, and deeper truths. Deeper truths are hard, the pithy quote in your feed is easy.
Taking time away from social media, gives one the space to make real art. It gives one time to search for art and experiences that foster art as well. This is something to think about, when you’re not checking your phone to see how many people liked your skull painting or breakup couplet. (Guilty and guilty.)
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.
