Poetry and Ambition - Donald Hall

The United States invented mass quick-consumption and we are very good at it. We are not famous for making Ferraris and Rolls Royces; we are famous for the people's car, the Model T, the Model A - "transportation," as we call it: the particular abstracted into the utilitarian generality - and two in every garage. Quality is all very well but it is not democratic; if we insist on hand-building Rolls Royces most of us will walk to work. Democracy demands the interchangeable part and the worker on the production line; Thomas Jefferson may have had other notions but de Tocqueville was our prophet. Or take American cuisine: it has never added a sauce to the world's palate, but our fast food industry overruns the planet.

~Donald Hall in "Poetry and Ambition"

I've been contemplating poetry a lot recently, because I realize my works tends towards concise, dry, flavorless sentences without the Gusto! and panache of more enthusiastic artists. I can't describe a world with the brittle ice of a Morgenstern (Night Circus), or define a depth of character like a Dostoevsky, but I long for some of the beauty present in great poetry. 

And I know that I'm falling into that trap that Donald Hall presents here so exquisitely: the McDonald's of art. Granted, I'm not selling, and everything I write in journal, online, or in my practice doodles is just that: practice, and so I don't feel like a sellout. But this is the American way, isn't it? Find something that works, and mass produce it? The first movie did well; let's make six. 

One of the poets I've been enjoying this week was named Elizabeth Bishop. She told an interviewer that she was prepared to wait forty years for a finished poem, since no artist can afford to rush. Now, I've saved all of my poems (and creative works in general) so I may return and tinker with them often, tuning up the wince-worthy weaknesses and fleshing out the skeletons of unfinished works, breathing life into the dusty husks of old poetry and prose - but could I manage forty years of patience?

Actually, I believe I might be capable of just such a thing.

I understand that level of contemplating, that hunt for perfect tonality and melopoeia that rolls off the tongue like a song. Isn't that the original form of literary expression, passed from generation to generation? I think I want a return into the epics, where a minstrel prays the muse will strengthen his art, as he strums a story of heroic deeds.
It amazes me how terrible some of my work can be, but I continue knowing that if one gem appears from a field of folly and ugly stone, or if I can persevere through such a shameful valley, the other side will be the greener for it.

I abhor the concept of the McProse, the McPoem, and fear the slippery slope that concludes in such a thing. But practice calls, and I've still years of such to go, and so much still to learn. Until such time as I'm ready, I suppose I'll be flipping words like burgers, and frying lines, and I'll be doing so in a flurry.