Substack has given me room to stretch. No where else have I been able to write horror movie criticism and half-formed cultural commentaries. I spend my time outside of Substack running a press and writing poems or, depending who’s reading, something that barely resembles poetry. (Was it Ron Silliman who said he doesn’t write poems, he writes poetry?) If a reader didn’t know this about me, it wouldn’t be immediately clear from reading La Bête.
For no reason other than compulsion, I’ve been reflecting on my Substack so far. Putting aside update posts - free ebooks and interviews - alongside personal posts I’m quite proud of, I’ve come to feel those horror movie pieces and commentaries are shit. This may well be a writer having a moment: it happens. But following this train of thought takes me to interesting places.
My background is free improvisation and extreme noise. I can think of no better experience for writers starting out. Performers stand with no clue what’s about to happen. The only given is they’re going to do something that has no context in popular culture, that a percentage of the audience might heckle or gossip to their friends with words like pretentious. Some of the audience might leave. And after, this last bit is crucial, the performers go back and keep on performing in public. If writers did this, consistently, for at least a year, many of their anxieties (Am I doing it right? Am I any good? I’m an imposter… I’m scared of rejection…) would be significantly reduced.
The Substack posts I think are shit will not be deleted. If they are shit, I can let them be shit and fuck with any sense of the writer as a totalising authority; of writing as static, striving to be infallible.
A lot of the critical pieces I want to write require more research and thinky juice than I have time for. Poetry and publishing: that is what I want to do with my life. The very infrequent La Bête podcast will continue, but I’ll likely make it even more conversational than it already is. I don’t need to spend so much of my energy trying to make episodes intellectually substantial. I can trust the guests. And the Substack posts will become broadly intimate in tone - like this one - and less likely to test drive critical styles.
I hear a lot of talk in news reports and social media about creating sustainable economic growth, or a sustainable ecosystem… I want sustainable creativity: a creativity that is self-renewing. Or, to quote Jennifer Holzer: LISTEN WHEN YOUR BODY TALKS. Forcing writing to fit where it isn’t suited (i.e. forcing should-be long form critical thinking, that requires research, into what is, essentially, a blog) will always suck. This is a move towards sustainable creativity.