How to Write an Economics Essay: Key Steps for Writing
I know a successful contemporary poet, one who for a while won award after award (lately the critics have been cruel—I confess to a degree of schadenfreude at seeing the envious consume each other). The poet pretends to likeability and enthusiasm (she possesses an ear-curdling guffaw), but is in my opinion entirely fraudulent. Since I dislike her so intensely and the dislike perhaps clouds my judgment, I will not supply her name. (I actually admire a few of the poems.) In her first book the poet attributes current personal dilemmas to a minor trauma at birth, surgically corrected soon after. The poet claims equal kinship because of this early suffering—explicitly, not merely metaphorically—I’m not making this up—with victims of oppression everywhere.
The cult of victimhood: Every poet today must be a victim, and must therefore concoct, if he or she has not personally undergone radical suffering or glaring injustice, a theory which establishes such victimhood. (Naturally, we must also ally ourselves unceasingly with genuine victims. They make good cover, and they also make good props on which to hang our theories.)
I heard a MacArthur winner read. The stuff was so awkward and ingenuous I would have had trouble with it as a freshman composition, and it was extremely condescending to those who were not of the race and opinions of the author. Perhaps I bridled because I am a redneck by nativity and upbringing, and the work was riddled with tossed-off denigrations of rednecks as a class. I agree that rednecks in general have caused the more grief, but I couldn't help thinking that if I had said similar things about the author's kindred—which I would never have even imagined doing—I would have been reviled.
But it wasn't so much the self-centeredness posing as enlightenment that offended me, the thoughtless assumption of correctness, the carelessness.
It was the way she adopted the stance of the victim to cover for her lack of talent. This stuff was not even competent at a juvenile level. It attempted mature themes (childbirth in the raw, for example) and failed miserably.
Way over the top.
Talent is the dirty word nowadays.
Talent doesn't make you a good person. It doesn't necessarily even make you a star. On the other hand, if you don't have talent, you can be a star, and you can be a very good person. But you can't be a very good poet.
Easy to say the fault was in me. But that lack of talent. Okay, she was using the language of the oppressors. Like there's any of us who don't. (I’m part Scot, part Irish, part Welsh, and part Cherokee, but I write in English). I'm not here to argue colonialism or appropriation. Such discussion is bogus. Language doesn't work by those rules. It makes its own rules, goes its own way. Language is the gift of the ages but the property of the individual.
I have, on occasion, been a victim. When I have been one, the only thing I wanted was not to be a victim any longer.
Nobody who knows anything about being a real victim imagines it improves character or sharpens talent. Yet here we have the spectacle of swarms of swaddled children aspiring to the saintliness of shared suffering.
I suspect this is so because we conceive the voice of the victim as being beyond reproach—having been wronged, one is automatically always right thereafter, and safe from all consideration of liveliness or grace.
Who wouldn't want to speak from such a secure platform?
But who wants to actually earn it? Not me. Injustice borne does not nobility confer, to put the matter in an antique and hexametric fashion.
Several years ago I was with a group of writers who described themselves, in conversation, as victims of oppression. They were generally young, and one or two had some degree of reputation. Why were they victims of oppression? Because our materialistic culture marginalized them, it turns out.
This was the actual phrasing.
Oh come on, I said. None of you are hungry. You all have a good place to sleep. Nobody's going to throw you in jail for speaking out. That, I said, is not oppression. So your culture, by and large, doesn't give a damn what you're up to. So what? That's frustration, not oppression.
(The reaction was as might have been expected. Didn’t I make it clear at the outset that I don’t always show a good sense of self-preservation”)
It's the spoiled child who interprets denial as punishment.
And isn't there a difference between being disadvantaged and being a victim? The borderline may be indistinct, but then borders usually are.
I do not attend readings of contemporary poetry if I can avoid them, because they are typically sentimental, amusical, and witless. One might forgive any of these flaws, but not all three together. There will occur, at these readings, whenever the poet produces yet another tragedy caused by those terrible oppressive wrong-thinking others, a wavelike nodding of heads: Yes, yes. We're all in it together, we the wronged, we who drift in sacred communal truth.
(One has the impression of a flock of those clever toys, the little fake cranes who dip their beaks over and over into a glass of water . . .)
There will occur the predictable laughter at the predictable mockery of the predictable villains. The drawn-out mutual sigh as we arrive at the clever tender moment, the predictable epiphany of love or vision: Awwwww . . .
The book I mentioned above contains yet another recounting of the horror of having had a father (whose only cited crimes are that he was somewhat louder and rougher than the frightened child would have wished).
Okay. Terrible fathers abound, granted. Beastly fathers. Unlike the poet, however, I have been a parent. I have raised children to capable and healthy adulthood. I know from experience how difficult it is to strike the correct balance. I know that there is a reason, a necessity for the gruffness and roughness of the male of the species, the tough bark of even a good father.
Perhaps this father deserved the obloquy. I could not tell from the poem. I suppose this sort of accusation without evidence is permissible nowadays because of the received contemporary doctrine that males are inherently tyrannical, the cause of all the evils of what is usually described as Western civilization. (Never mind that its philosophical origins lie in Greece and Israel.)
And if you think I make an apologia for brutality, you're a sad case.
Gina, thank you so much for your lovely words and for the praise. I truly love what you said “only happens when the words of the poet moves us beyond our limited understanding.”
My love and my best wishes for a great week ahead.
Thank you again from the bottom of my heart.
xoxoxo A. Well ... I would say that poetry is language charged with emotion. It's words, rhythmically organized . . . . A poem is a complete little universe. It exists separately. Any poem that has worth expresses the whole life of the poet. It gives a view of what the poet is. The editor had written in his rejection that since the magazine was receiving so many thousands of manuscripts for each issue, they were forced to limit submissions to once a year, four poems at a time.
Four poems a year. And the odds are extremely long against those four. I wrote that I would probably continue to submit, in the way that others play the lottery—waste of money, but hope is a pretty thing.
(As it happens, I never again sent them anything, or for that matter sent anything unsolicited to anyone else. Started thinking about the implications of that word, “submit,” and decided I didn’t like the position.)
It's pretty much the same for all the top magazines, I wrote.
The top few targets must receive hundreds of thousands of poems a year. Thing is, it's hardly different for the smaller journals. Every editor now tells me that she or he is buried under thousands of submissions.
Questions come to mind.
Like for instance, Who the hell are we kidding?
There's no way this preposterous situation is functional. This googolplex of wannabe poets throwing themselves at magazines like salmon flinging themselves upstream to mate and rot—even if we suppose that we all have worthy talent, we must ask ourselves how, buried in such a slithering cascade, any editorial staff could truly exercise appreciation, judgment, selection?
I have no doubt that these magazines must receive thousands of poems a year just from poets who can actually write a little, poets of some ability, and never mind the tens of thousands of hopelessly crippled manuscripts. You know the poets I mean. The ones who come up to you after readings and angrily jam a sheaf of papers in your direction; or the more timid sort, who only after knowing you a while will let it slip that they are poets, too, and would you take a look? In either case, you faithfully read the proffered material, realizing that it is the job of a real poet in this diseased culture to be an audience, not to have an audience. And after reading the work, you can come up with nothing to say.
These latter manuscripts are hopelessly mangled in one way or another: In syntax or sense or music, their creations are born dead and you cannot find the language to tell the authors that pity be, though we all are equal in the Lord's eyes, I'm sorry, but son or ma'am or creature-get, you just can't write.
Such efforts comprise most of the incoming that bombards every possible outlet today. A few of these people get through, by sheer persistence perhaps, perhaps because of ignorance or friends in the right places.
Nobody can explain them, but there they are, powers.
And as I say, I don't even mean these people. I mean the next rank, people who can actually use the language a bit. The ones for whom a knack, a twist, a quickness with the word came early. People who imagine that they, being poets of some accomplishment, deserve the loftiest of publications.
Forget the first batch. There are thousands of competing writers, even if we limit ourselves to the set of those who actually have some talent.
How is it possible for any editor to allot sufficient time to even the somewhat talented? Poetry, in our fashionable prattle, is outside time. Poetry requires absorption, contemplation, a timelessness of spirit. You can't read poetry fast. Right. There's 86,400 seconds a day. When I'm depressed, I think there's at least that many wannabe poets in the U. S. alone.
(Maybe that number isn’t so ridiculous: It would represent fewer than one in 2500 of our adult citizens. Personal experience can only be anecdotal, but I would swear the frequency of wannabes is higher than that.)
Ours is an age of uproar and output, not of listening. Everyone must be heard. We prove we exist by yammering constantly. We are compelled to prove what we know by voicing it, anxiously, rapidly, constantly.
Every voice is equal, and each of us is convinced the universe is unjust if we are not able to make our wailings and clever remarks heard above the general din, the hideous swirl of the polybabble.
What a condition, to be an editor and to be the object of so much desire. Surely one is forced to erect formidable barriers. But perhaps it is not so for the editors I submitted to. Perhaps they revel in the rivers of word and thought that tumble across their desks. I am not so generous.
In my opinion there is very little good poetry published today, much less great poetry. I read, when I can stand to, the effusions in the magazines. Everywhere I see, under the most prestigious of names, banality, archaisms, solipsism, (and from those who rail most loudly against such lapses) clumsiness, bathos, a refusal of rigorous thought, and an almost totally hermetic practice. One cannot believe that all of these authors are intentionally fraudulent.
So why is the poetry so, so—well, so cottonpicking bad?
No, worse than bad. Way worse. Boring.
Why does bad poetry happen to good people? Why isn't sincerity and suffering and a clear complexion and planetary sympathy enough?
Maybe I'm wrong. That's the simplest explanation.
But if I’m wrong, why can no one explain to me, in clear and precise language, exactly what it is I'm not catching on to? I'm not tone-deaf, and I'm not stupid about people, forms, change, or the truly original.
Maybe there's a brilliant and shining world of new music and feeling out there, a world I simply can't perceive. Perhaps I am a living fossil who lacks the new perceptive apparatus. Perhaps. I read this on a book-jacket: Aristotle, Rhetoric 1410b: “We may now consider the above points settled, and pass on to say something about the way to devise lively and taking sayings. . . . We will begin by remarking that we all naturally find it agreeable to get hold of new ideas easily: words express ideas, and therefore those words are the most agreeable that enable us to get hold of new ideas. Now strange words simply puzzle us; ordinary words convey only what we know already; it is from metaphor that we can best get hold of something fresh. When the poet calls "old age a withered stalk," he conveys a new idea, a new fact, to us by means of the general notion of bloom, which is common to both things. The similes of the poets do the same, and therefore, if they are good similes, give an effect of brilliance. The simile, as has been said before, is a metaphor, differing from it only in the way it is put; and just because it is longer it is less attractive. Besides, it does not say outright that "this" is "that," and therefore the hearer is less interested in the idea. We see, then, that both speech and reasoning are lively in proportion as they make us seize a new idea promptly. For this reason people are not much taken either by obvious arguments (using the word "obvious" to mean what is plain to everybody and needs no investigation), nor by those which puzzle us when we hear them stated, but only by those which convey their information to us as soon as we hear them, provided we had not the information already; or which the mind only just fails to keep up with. These two kinds do convey to us a sort of information: but the obvious and the obscure kinds convey nothing, either at once or later on. I realize that as we have approached the end of this poem, it has turned – as so often poems do – into being about poetry. Carson leads us there. But I think she means to go beyond poetry, that poetry is used here as a symbol for human existence. For Carson’s essay is ultimately not about something as limited as ‘the need for poetry.’ No, it is about how error need not be crippling. We can survive error, learn from it, and make something new of it: not just a poem, but a life. Error, as Aristotle had proposed, allows us to “get hold of something new and fresh.” It leaps beyond syllogism and a careful and parsed rationality to do what the Chinese proverb, which Carson quoted earlier, insists is impossible. For it turns out, by the conclusion of this poem, the proverb “Brush cannot write two characters with one stroke” is itself an error.