Brain Food #534
On not throwing away one's work
Thoughts of the day
I recall having a conversation with someone, who told me she had found all her teenage diaries, read them, and burned them to the ground. I challenged her; why burn part of who you are, or destroy what you made?
Continuing with Mary Ruefle’s meandering mind, because one newsletter is certainly not enough to fit it all, here is the result of not throwing away her work:
I’ve always been writing these pieces, but they’d been edited out of books because they didn’t fit. Today no one would blink, but my first book of poems was published in 1982 and the prose just didn’t “work,” so I saved them. When my first collection of prose came out, The Most of It, in 2008, there were pieces in it that were written in 2005, 2006, 2007, but the earliest one is from 1975. It’s not a big book, so it’s not as if I was writing them furiously, but as they arose, they got put in the prose folder. One of the pieces in that book, “Beautiful Day,” I found in a folder on the floor. It was handwritten, because I handwrite everything initially, and I said, What’s this? When did I write this? How’d it get here? I had no memory of it. I started to read it and sort of liked it, so I typed it up. And if I couldn’t read my handwriting, I just put new sentences in. I remember it had made me very happy because I thought, This is fun, I don’t have to write anything. It’s here in a folder and it’s done!
The lesson is simple: to make without an agenda, and to not always kill one’s darlings. You never know when it will be the right time for them to meet the world.
There are occasions, of course, when exactly the opposite happens. It is not rare in the art world for someone’s work to be mistaken for rubbish, even if that opinion is not shared by the artists themselves.
One such example is the below exhibit, titled "Where shall we go dancing tonight?", created by artist duo Goldschmied and Chiari, and displayed at the Museion in Bolzano. The cleaners, mistaking it for the remnants of a party, threw it away, also finding time to separate the glass, plastic, and paper, into separate bags.
The artwork was eventually rescued and re-installed.
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