Vainglorious Opinion and How to Avoid It

One more great comic from Toothpaste for Dinner

I am addled with imperfections and riddled with flaws, dear reader, but sometimes I get cocksure about my intellect and wisdom. Luckily for me, though, someone takes me down a notch and reminds me that I, in fact, don't know everything. These humbling experiences make me think further and harder, and let us hope they keep me from becoming an opinionated gasbag...

A friend asked me to read his poetry manuscript and offer some feedback, and I said I would although anyone who has ever done so knows that parsing a manuscript can be laborious. However, this is an old friend whose work I have admired in the past, and here was an opportunity to get yet another opinion on my own belabored manuscript since he agreed to an exchange.

I began reading his manuscript, and I found the poetry difficult. The poems were ciphers in many cases, and I became impatient with their inaccessibility. Then I found myself getting exasperated as I pawed through the poems looking for scraps of narrative, which function for me like yellow brick roads through the difficult terrain of verse. Then I got crabby about my friend's poetry.

What followed was an e-mail exchange that I will paraphrase here in the interest of blog brevity. I wrote to him to say that I was not a good judge of experimental poetry because I'm a slave to the narrative. Then I said that experimental poetry is to blame for alienating the general reading public from poetry as a whole. (I know, right? What a dick.) Then I admitted to intellectual laziness, which did not prevent me from complaining about how I didn't get this or that in his manuscript. My e-mail was not very generous. It was kind of critical in a non-constructive way, in fact.

To paraphrase his reply, he said that he understood if it was not my type of poetry, but he was hoping for some insight into ordering the poems. He said don't worry if you're not moved, but that there is room for all types of poetry. Furthermore, he pointed out that the poems I was most critical of were the ones that were published in their current form, which confirms poetry's "rich diversity" to quote him. He finished by saying that he liked reading to be a process as much as writing and that interpretation was open for debate.

So there you have it, dear reader. I shot my friend down because I didn't get what he was trying to do with his poetry. And his response made me wish I could back-peddle when I'm generally one who will continue to support my opinion. In this case, however, my friend showed me rather quickly that my opinion had no merit. And here's why:

I did to his poetry what I accused his poetry of doing to the reading public, and how can I lament the intellectual laziness of the reading public when I was dismissive of his work because it was too challenging? How absurd and hypocritical. Bad, Sonia, bad.

If I've managed to keep your interest until now, perhaps you can imagine how this post about poetry can be extrapolated to apply to other matters of judgement and taste. Who am I, who is anyone, to judge what one likes and dislikes in matters of the arts? How different we all are, how different are the circumstances of our upbringing, how different is the arrangement of our neurons and synapses, how differently we think, how different are our intellects. Of course there is no accounting for what one appreciates. Furthermore, all sensory and aesthetic experiences are acquired tastes. And my friend is right; there are so many of us out here looking for truth and beauty that there must be room for all of it.

As for judgement, kind reader, we should be more sympathetic to what others love. This is not to say, of course, that all artistic pursuits merit respect. There will always be bad art, music, and poetry, but it's reasonable to say that if an artist, musician, or poet has garnered a following, a contract, a show, or a label, then we must acknowledge that people like it in ways that we will not understand. Therefore, instead of using negative language to disparage, say, contemporary country music or Thomas Kinkade, I will simply say that it's not for me because I'm not really drawn to it.  Moreover, what draws us to an aesthetic, sensory, or intellectual experience is something we're often hardwired with.

If you don't like something, you have the right to avoid it.

Let me disclaim a little bit here when I say that we should not let ourselves off the hook too easily when it comes to matters of intellect and leisurely pursuit. We should not always take the path of least resistance when it comes to how we spend our leisure time, or we risk squandering it. For example, how many episodes of Big Bang Theory can I watch before my eyes glaze over? A richer experience might be worth the extra tender. So, bright reader, go and read a poem. Whatever flavor of verse you prefer. I won't judge.  

As for me, now that I have shamed myself into open-mindedness, I must return to my friend's manuscript because I owe him further commentary.