Donald Hall on the cons and pros of poetry workshops.

Excerpt from interview with Donald Hall in THE PARIS REVIEW:

INTERVIEWER

Marianne Moore went to school and she wrote poetry, but she did not study creative writing in school. Do you think the institution of the creative writing program has helped the cause of poetry?

HALL

Well, not really, no. I’ve said some nasty things about these programs. The Creative Writing Industry invites us to use poetry to achieve other ends—a job, a promotion, a bibliography, money, notoriety. I loathe the trivialization of poetry that happens in creative writing classes. Teachers set exercises to stimulate subject matter: Write a poem about an imaginary landscape with real people in it. Write about a place your parents lived in before you were born. We have enough terrible poetry around without encouraging more of it. Workshops make workshop-poems. Also, workshops encourage a kind of local competition, being better than the poet who sits next to you—in place of the useful competition of trying to be better than Dante. Also, they encourage a groupishness, an old-boy and -girl network that often endures for decades.

The good thing about workshops is that they provide a place where young poets can gather and argue—the artificial café. We’re a big country without a literary capital. Young poets from different isolated areas all over the country can gather with others of their kind.

And I suppose that workshops have contributed to all the attention that poetry’s been getting in the last decades. Newspaper people and essayists always whine about how we don’t read poetry the way we used to—in the twenties, for example. Bullshit! Just compare the numbers of books of poems sold then and now. Even in the fifties, a book of poems published by some eminent poet was printed in an edition of a thousand hardback copies. If it sold out everyone was cheerful. In 1923 Harmonium didn’t sell out—Stevens was remaindered, for heaven’s sake! A book of poetry today by a poet who’s been around will be published in an edition of five to seven thousand copies and often reprinted.

But it’s not the Creative Writing Industry itself that sells books; it’s the poetry readings. Practically nobody in the twenties and thirties and forties did readings. Vachel Lindsay, early, then Carl Sandburg, then Robert Frost—nobody else. If you look at biographies of Stevens and Williams and Moore, you see that they read their poems once every two years if they were lucky. Poetry readings started to grow when Dylan Thomas came over in the late forties and fifties. By this time there are three million poetry readings a year in the United States. Oh, no one knows how many there are. Sometimes I think I do three million a year.

In the sixties when the poetry reading boom got going people went to their state universities and heard poets read. When they went back to their towns they got the community college to bring poets in or they set up their own series through an arts group. Readings have proliferated enormously and spread sideways from universities to community colleges, prep schools, and arts associations. I used to think, Well, this is nice while it lasts but it’ll go away. It hasn’t gone away. There are more than ever.

A rebuttal to the Ryan Boudinot MFA article.

There are over 100 comments about Ryan Boudinot's article on THE STRANGER site--which I excerpted for my last blog post.

Here's one from "emmaz" and I've highlighted a certain passage that perfectly summarizes what I've been trying to say for years about "the poetry community."

The irony of this article is that Boudinot seems to genuinely think that he's courageously speaking a truth that no one wants to hear, when he's actually just spouting the dominant ideology that has held sway for a few hundred years now about the arts. That old saw that creativity is best left to a few genius artists who are "born that way," and if most of the celebrated voices are white and male, then that is just an indication of how God distributes talent. That's a western enlightenment attitude that supports the ruling class and the hegemonic status quo. I personally think that the more people who engage in the arts, in any capacity, the better the arts will be and the more interesting and just our culture will be. Why would we ever want to encourage less participation, if not to police who gets to speak?

Sifting out the good advice from the bad re Ryan Boudinot.

Recently, an article from Seattle literary majordomo Ryan Boudinot appeared on my Facebook feed---something about what he'll tell you about MFA programs.

Here's the constructive portion:

You don't need my help to get published.

When I was working on my MFA between 1997 and 1999, I understood that if I wanted any of the work I was doing to ever be published, I'd better listen to my faculty advisers. MFA programs of that era were useful from a professional development standpoint—I still think about a lecture the poet Jason Shinder gave at Bennington College that was full of tremendously helpful career advice I use to this day. But in today's Kindle/e-book/self-publishing environment, with New York publishing sliding into cultural irrelevance, I find questions about working with agents and editors increasingly old-fashioned. Anyone who claims to have useful information about the publishing industry is lying to you, because nobody knows what the hell is happening. My advice is for writers to reject the old models and take over the production of their own and each other's work as much as possible.

It's not important that people think you're smart.

After eight years of teaching at the graduate level, I grew increasingly intolerant of writing designed to make the writer look smart, clever, or edgy. I know this work when I see it; I've written a fair amount of it myself. But writing that's motivated by the desire to give the reader a pleasurable experience really is best. I told a few students over the years that their only job was to keep me entertained, and the ones who got it started to enjoy themselves, and the work got better. Those who didn't get it were stuck on the notion that their writing was a tool designed to procure my validation. The funny thing is, if you can put your ego on the back burner and focus on giving someone a wonderful reading experience, that'sthe cleverest writing.

Other times, Mr. Boudinot plays the Tough Guy to grating effect:

If you didn't decide to take writing seriously by the time you were a teenager, you're probably not going to make it.

There are notable exceptions to this rule, Haruki Murakami being one. But for most people, deciding to begin pursuing creative writing in one's 30s or 40s is probably too late. Being a writer means developing a lifelong intimacy with language. You have to be crazy about books as a kid to establish the neural architecture required to write one.

No one cares about your problems if you're a shitty writer.

I worked with a number of students writing memoirs. One of my Real Deal students wrote a memoir that actually made me cry. He was a rare exception. For the most part, MFA students who choose to write memoirs are narcissists using the genre as therapy. They want someone to feel sorry for them, and they believe that the supposed candor of their reflective essay excuses its technical faults. Just because you were abused as a child does not make your inability to stick with the same verb tense for more than two sentences any more bearable. In fact, having to slog through 500 pages of your error-riddled student memoir makes me wish you had suffered more.

The article in its entirety:

http://www.thestranger.com/books/features/2015/02/27/21792750/things-i-can-say-about-mfa-writing-programs-now-that-i-no-longer-teach-in-one

Feedback on works-in-progress: advice that works for film or literature.

The passage below is quoted from an article on the filmmaking blog MENTORLESS about Quentin Tarantino's experience at the Sundance Lab in 1991 developing RESERVOIR DOGS (difficult to imagine now, since more recent developed-at-Sundance cinema tends to lean more towards middle-of-the-road ennobling and/or redemptive storytelling).  It can be easily transposed to poetry or literary workshop situations.

Link to the complete article: http://www.mentorless.com/2015/01/26/tarantinos-experience-sundance-lab-1991-can-teach-us-feedbacks?utm_content=buffer7b004&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

What to Keep in Mind When We Ask for Feedback

A lot of people are not aware of the distinction between emotional and constructive feedback and think that giving their emotional opinion is a feedback.

Maybe they don’t have the tools to verbalize or point out to specifics, and then it means that we asked the wrong person to do an impossible task. So, the first step to enhance our chances to get constructive feedback is to ask people who have a certain skill-set and/or knowledge that we think might be helpful.

What to Keep in Mind When We Receive Feedback

I believe that when we receive feedback, we need to ask ourselves what type of feedback we are actually given: are they emotional or constructive feedback?

If we are receiving constructive feedback, then whatever the note, it needs to be acknowledged and considered, even if it hurts, and/or might ultimately been ignored for the purpose of the project we make.

If it’s emotional feedback, then we need to remember that this doesn’t say anything about our ability to tell a story, our work simply didn’t connect enough with the person to ignite constructive feedback.

What to Keep in Mind When We Give Feedback

When we give feedback, we need to put aside our feelings about the piece, and try to use our skills -whatever those skills- to give constructive feedback. That can be offering solutions, that can be giving perspective, and that always imply reminding the other person that those feedback are only suggestions made to inspire and can be ignored. (In other words, it’s not about our ego)

Also, It’s Very Hard for Everybody

It is hard to be honest and give good notes to someone. It is much easier to say that you loved whatever they did, point out to three things you liked and moved on.

And it is hard to receive notes gracefully, even if you know these notes are good notes, a part of you might have hoped to hear that everything was perfect (I know I’ve felt that several times, even though I knew it was not good enough.)

I believe that our job as a community is to help each other out by trying to be generous and genuine while offering constructive feedback, and by being brave enough to share our work with people who can give constructive feedback, and take the result gracefully. It all comes back to being vulnerable.

David Orr, NEW YORK TIMES literary critic, on James Franco, Poet.

Here's Mr. Orr's review of Mr. Franco's book of poems titled DIRECTING HERBERT WHITE:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/books/review/james-franco-poet.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0

And here's a relevant (at least to me) passage from the review:
"...the annoyance this collection will inspire is rooted in a deeper anxiety: The attention commanded by James Franco’s poetry has everything to do with “James Franco” and almost nothing to do with poetry. And that cultural wealth is not transferable. Attention withheld from Franco’s poems will not instantly devolve upon some worthy but obscure poet; it will go to another actor, or singer, or commercial nonfiction writer, or memoirist — or even to James Franco in his novel-writing incarnation. Poetry is the weak sister of its sibling arts, alternately ignored and swaddled like a 19th-century invalid, and that will change only by means of a long, tedious and possibly futile effort at persuasion. Perhaps it’s a blessing to have James Franco on one’s side in that struggle."

Dr. Seuss, THE SNEETCHES and MFA programs.

Someone I follow on Twitter retweeted this photo Josh Sternberg took of a certain wall painting in Phoenix, AZ:
http://ift.tt/1jqHCIp

Poet Julia Stein gets Murrayed.

"If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."--Elmore Leonard

But in the world of poetry, some people (particularly reviewers who wish to culturally shape their communities) prefer writing that sounds like writing.

Here are two excerpts from G. Murray Thomas' review of Julia Stein's book WHAT WERE THEY LIKE?

But too often the poems acquire their power through flat statements, rather than poetic language. This is especially true in the final lines with which she closes many of her poems. Too often they end with a line which punches the gut without engaging the imagination. “A cruise missile left her/ paralyzed on half of her body.” (“I Wanted to Believe”); “I ask Congress to stop the destruction of this city.” (“Do I look like a Sumerian goddess”); “she wants to send money to stop the war” (“My Mama Remembers”).

What Were They Like? delivers a powerful anti-war message. Stein succeeds in her goal of showing the lives of average people swept up in the horror of war. But I’m sad to say it rarely rises to the level of great poetry in the process. Regular readers of my reviews know I like my poetry open-ended. I like to discover meaning in the poems I read, not be slapped in the face with it. Poetry is such a perfect format for expressing ambiguity that, to be honest, I feel cheated when a poet does less with it.

The full review can be read at http://www.poetix.net

My two cents on the "Poetry Slam" article in HARPER'S.

The article in Harper's is written by an English professor at the University of Virginia. And it's essentially someone adopting a rebel-in-academia stance venting about poets (Merwin, Muldoon, Graham etc.) being too "opaque and evasive" when writing at length, not to mention not writing verse more actively engaged with the modern world as it is.

At the same time, Adrienne Rich is downgraded by Mr. Edmundson for not having enough of "the gift of artful expression" and giving audiences "eloquent, polemical prose." Notice the slap of the word "prose" in his quote.

It's an essay that seeks to slaughter sacred cows (Edmundson's comments about the homogenizing effect of MFA programs on poetry match up with what Billy Collins said a few years back at a Skirball Center reading in West L.A.), but also proving that Mark Edmondson doesn't want to take any time looking at small presses and lesser-known print and online journals to familiarize himself with men and women that aren't Household Names in the world of poetry (a la Brendan Bernhard's article in LA WEEKLY about fourteen years earlier).

Seth Abramson and Mark Edmundson's differing views on contemporary poetry.

Here's a link to an everything's-just-peachy-and-glowing-about-poetry-today HUFFINGTON POST column by Seth Abramson: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/seth-abramson/why-is-contemporary-ameri_b_3474969.html

Abramson's writing this as apparent rebuttal to a recent essay in HARPER'S magazine titled "Poetry Slam" by Mark Edmundson.

Edmundson's essay is gated online to HARPER's subscribers only.  But I'll quote several excerpts to give readers of this post a notion as to why Abramson felt he needed to respond.

"Most of our poets now speak a deeply internal language not unlike [W.S.] Merwin's.  They tend to be oblique, equivocal, painfully self-questioning.  They not only talk to themselves in their poems; they frequently talk to themselves about talking to themselves...At a time when collective issues--communal issues, political issues--are pressing, our poets have become ever more private, idiosyncratic, and withdrawn.  Their poetry is not heard but overheard, and sometimes is too hermetic even to overhear with anything like comprehension."

"Contemporary American poets now seem to put all their energy into one task: the creation of a voice.  They strive to sound like no one else.  And that often means poets end up pushing what is most singular and idiosyncratic in themselves and in the language to the fore and ignoring what they have in common with others.  The current poet may give a certain sort of pleasure by his uniqueness, but no one reading him will say what [Ralph Waldo] Emerson hoped to say when he encountered a poet who mattered: 'This is my music; this is myself.'"

"What happens when poets at the height of ambition somehow feel the need to be programmatically obscure?  The obvious result is that they shut out the common reader.  But they also give critics far too much room to determine poetic meanings--and this may be why some critics so love [Jorie] Graham and [Paul] Muldoon and [Anne] Carson and [John] Ashbery.  Their poems are so underdetermined in their sense that the critic gets to collaborate on the verses, in effect becoming a co-creator.  This is a boon to critics, but readers rightly look to poets to make sense of the world, even if it is a difficult sense--and not to pass half the job off to Ph.D's."

"Any modern poet who thinks of himself as creating a full-scale map of experience would be dismissed as hubristic and probably out of his mind.  The poet writes the fragment that is given to him to write; the idea of channeling all experience, or all experience that matters, is entirely foreign.  Poets now are music makers, not mythmakers.  Their poems are like isolated droplets shimmering beautifully on a pane of glass.  [Edmundsen goes on to dismiss individual poems by Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver, Frank Bidart, Charles Simic, Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky.]  All these poems are good in their ways.  They simply aren't good enough.  They don't slake a reader's thirst for meanings that pass beyond the experience of the individual poet and light up the world we have in common."

"Contemporary American poetry speaks its own confined language, not ours.  It is, by and large, pure.  It does not generally traffic in the icons of pop culture; it doesn't immerse itself in ad-speak, rock lyrics, or politicians' posturing: it gravitates to the obscure, the recondite, the precious, the ancient, trying to get outside the mush of culture that surrounds it.  The result is poetry that can be exquisite, but that has too few resources to use to take on consequential events."

"Mass culture and mechanical reproduction surely play a part in the current retreat of American poetry, but what about MFA programs?  Poetry now is something of a business.  You make your way into the game by getting a sponsor: often it's a writer-in-residence from your undergraduate school.  Then comes the MFA and the first book, both of which usually require sponsorship--which is to say pull."

"To thrive in this process you often must write in the mode of the mentor--you must play the game that is there to be played.  You must be a member of the school, you must sing in the correct key.  If you try to overwhelm the sponsor, explode his work into irrelevance--well, the first law of success is simple: Never outshine the master.  The well-tempered courtier knows how to make those above him feel surperior.  He knows that in his desire to succeed he must not go far in displaying what he can do.  The master will not like it--and there will be no first book, no fellowship, no job, no preferment.  It is only by making the master look more accomplished, by writing in his mode, becoming a disciple, that the novice ascends."

Revised old poem POET IN BLACK

Dana Gioia 2012 vs. Dana Gioia circa 1999: re the L.A. Poet Laureate announcement.

http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2012/08/city_hall_announces_new_p.php

"It is wonderful to announce the new Poet Laureate position,” Poet Laureate Task Force Chair Dana Gioia said. “Los Angeles is the creative capital of the 21st century. Honoring poets and writers with this new public office is a fitting symbol for the power of the language and the imagination in our remarkable community."--from the article above

http://www.laweekly.com/1999-09-23/news/perhaps-these-are-not-poetic-times-at-all/

 "There is a huge renaissance of poetry activity in L.A.," Gioia told me over the phone from his home in Northern California, "but there are no governing standards. You can't have great literature without great standards, and no one wants to hear this, especially in L.A. There's a real mistaken impression that more art is better art, whereas in fact lots of bad poetry will deaden the appetite for good poetry."--from Brendan Bernhard's article "Perhaps These Are Not Poetic Times At All."

Another blue period before a burst of activity.

For me, the beginning of summer has become increasingly bittersweet in recent years.

My wife and I have usually taken our annual vacation by the beginning of June--and there's the post-vacation letdown as I face the prospect of re-entering what's known as "the poetry community."

Although I've told plenty of tales-out-of-school on this blog, there are times when I wish I had the survival instinct of most community members to shut up, suck it up, pull in the metaphorical stomach and not venture unwanted/unwelcome opinions about how/why things are done (plus the sometimes arbitrary forms of literary Darwinism practiced).  I will acknowledge that lots of poets--even those I may not care for personally/aesthetically--work very hard at what they do, even if some feel they have to perform steps A-B-C (usually spelled M-F-A) to get their work taken seriously by academia/publishers/literary agents.

So, as this summer begins, I'm going to resist the temptation to hibernate artistically and resume work on a project which began eleven summers ago.

That project is called HOLLYWOOD POETRY; two chapbooks self-published in 2001 and 2004 were its initial form.  In recent years, I've combined the best of the chapbooks into one volume of poetry and have occasionally made it available as an e-book.

Now begins the process of finding someone to publish HOLLYWOOD POETRY.  It's likely, at this point, that I'll have to resort to self-funding a print-on-demand version through a pay-to-play publisher such as, say, Trafford.  It would be nice to have it published by a local small press, but I fear that HOLLYWOOD POETRY doesn't meet the standards of what is considered "real" poetry.

On the plane from NYC to L.A. earlier this week, I read some of Robert Frost's NORTH OF BOSTON.  HOLLYWOOD POETRY could best be described as a group of stories-in-verse a la Frost's famous "The Death of the Hired Man"--though more humorous.

The odds may be against me, but I'd like to think that HOLLYWOOD POETRY, once it finds it's way into the world as a "proper" print volume/e-book, might find an appreciative audience of poets and nonpoets alike.

Asking those who read this to wish me well.  I'm crossing fingers that the book can be ready by this fall or early 2013.

There's probably one or two of these in your poetry community.

To elaborate on the post title: In your poetry community, there's probably a man/woman who has worked at least a decade sizing up which poets are vital to know, who has learned how to write great grant proposals, who has learned how to speak poetry jargon like "journal-entry poems", who tirelessly networks, who is in an MFA program at a local university (teaching and/or running a reading series there), who has had one-time detractors now clamoring for his/her favor and support, etc. etc. etc. Not to forget mentioning his/her poetry tends to be evaluated chiefly in terms of his/her current prestige. Guessing you know someone like that and are careful not to say anything negative about him/her lest you harm your literary poetry career.

Re the stampede of poets towards the Golden Ticket of an MFA program.

"You’re not getting an MFA to get funded by an MFA program, nor to have a good teaching load, nor to move somewhere with an ideal cost of living. You’re getting an MFA to have your writing taken seriously by serious writers who you respect."

The quote above comes from an article called LETTER TO AN MFA APPLICANT by Samuel Amadon.

Mr. Amadon's article can be found in its entirety here:
http://coldfrontmag.com/features/letter-to-an-mfa-applicant-by-samuel-amadon

Let's put Mr. Amadon's raves about the Columbia University School of the Arts writer's program (and its great expense--and, to him, great rewards) to one side of the table.  (Also, let's pass over his putdown of the Poets and Writers magazine's "ranking" of schools with MFA programs too).

And I'm now going to say something filled with poetic incorrectness in this age of Mass Artistic Conformity.

You don't really need to spend all that money to enter an MFA program to be taken seriously as a poet.

If you want to learn valuable lessons about writing and personal style from great poets, either buy their real (or digital) chapbooks/Real Books or check them out of your nearest public library.

Better yet, search out a copy of the book ECSTATIC OCCASIONS, EXPEDIENT FORMS if you wish to acquire the knowledge about rhyme, meter and different variations of poetic form.

If you wish to receive praise or criticism from poets you admire, then make contact with them at readings.  See if they'll accept copies of your poems or DIY/small press chapbooks for appraisal/feedback.  Some of them may be helpful/encouraging and others may turn out to be hurtful, obnoxious, self-important jerks wanting no one on the road to success but themselves.  Take everything with a grain of salt;  be joyful in the realization that you haven't paid the equivalent of $250.00/hour to have your strengths and weaknesses as a poet analyzed--you've essentially received it for free.

And keep writing, submitting and networking (although there will be times when poets all around you will say that an MFA is a must and climb into the academic machine like the Sneetches wanting a tummy star in the Dr. Seuss fable).

That way, a large chunk of your hard-earned money hasn't disappeared in case you need it for emergency reasons.

Last of all, please don't be afraid to thank me.

Josh Wilker's critique of THE BAD NEWS BEARS IN BREAKING TRAINING--a passage reminding me of current SoCal poetry politics.

Soft Skull Press has been publishing a series of small books known as Deep Focus: A Novel Approach to Cinema where Name Authors write eloquently on what they consider to be seminal films.

Chicago-based author Josh Wilker chose the semi-forgotten THE BAD NEWS BEARS IN BREAKING TRAINING, the quickly-thrown-together 1977 sequel to Michael Ritchie and Bill Lancaster's classic 1976 original. (Needless to say, Ritchie and Lancaster--as well as original stars Walter Matthau and Tatum O'Neal--didn't return for the second film.)

Wilker, who was nine when he saw BREAKING TRAINING, does a fair amount of rhapsodizing about his own boyhood, along with some side detours into philosophizing about a 1970s he was too young to completely experience.

For those who remember BREAKING TRAINING, the hapless Bears play a more professional Little League team in the Houston Astrodome in the small window of time between an Astros double-header.
The powers that be want to halt the children's game early in order for the grown-ups to begin playing their second match of the day.  Both teams are shooed off the field by baseball officials--except for the perpetually idealistic Tanner (Chris Barnes), who stands his ground and refuses to leave.

Wilker talks about Jimmy Carter's much-mocked "malaise" speech from the summer of 1979 and its plea for "common interest and the restoration of American values" over what was already the looming spectre of Reagan-era self-interest and "I want more than you'll ever have."

Here's my favorite passage of Wilker's in the book:
I keep coming back to refuse disconnection, and I keep coming back to refuse the end.  And now we come to the climax of the movie.  Not the ultimately negligible, if structurally necessary, moment when Carmen scores the winning run, but the part that actually precedes that false climax, the part that begins when all seems to be lost, when the team is told, right in the middle of an early inning, that the game is over.  There are initial groans and protests about this, but they are all impotent, even Mike Leak [William Devane as the estranged father of Jackie Earle Haley's Kelly Leak] giving up after arguing for a while with the ump.  Everybody has given up and accepted the end, with one exception.

Tanner's still out there, standing alone.

[fast-forward through a passage about Watergate and Richard Nixon's resignation revealing "a system driven by corporate interests and not by the will of the people, contrary to the nation's dream of democracy."]

"Where's everybody going?" Tanner asks.  "We're not finished!"

Two men in suits advance toward him.  They are not evil.  They are not stand-ins for Nixon.  They are, in a way, worse.  They are functionaries, apologetic but assertive, pointing to their watches and invoking the god that rules the country, money.  The game is a commercial-driven diversion between the commercial-driven diversions of the first and second games of a doubleheader.  The important thing turns out to be the commercials.  They, and what they sell, and the corporations that rake in the profits, rule.  Everyone else has to get in line.  I'm sorry, the men in suits explain, but that's just the way it is.  And they advance toward Tanner to remove the last dissenter from the field.

Now re-read Wilker's words above--substituting "poetry", "MFA degrees", "prestige", "coffeehouse poets [imagine it being said with a sneer]", "creative writing programs", "journal-entry writing", etc. etc. when you feel it necessary.

Trust me, you'll see a synchronicity.

I can feel Kevin Smith's pain.

From Kevin Smith's SILENT BOB SPEAKS blog (http://www.silentbobspeaks.com), here's a primal scream worthy of John Lennon's PLASTIC ONO BAND album--and one I can empathize with:
"For years, cats like cranky ol’ Mr. “GET OFF MY FRIEND HOLLYWOOD’S LAWN!” would write shit that diminished me as a filmmaker because I didn’t fit into their limited definition of what a filmmaker is. I believed that shit for nearly twenty years. But I’m a grownup now – which means I’ve realized that no jackass who doesn’t do what I do for a living can ever tell me I’m bad at my art. That’s some backwards-ass bullshit right there: s’like a priest giving marital advice to newlyweds. If you don’t ever fuck, there’s no way anything you say about fucking is relevant to the discussion. No artist will ever tell another artist “You failed.” There is no failure in art, because art – like beauty – is in the eye of the beholder. No audience is a Borg collective: show 100 people the same movie and they’ll have 100 totally different experiences and reactions, far more diverse and interesting than a thumb pointing this way or that. So when the cranks get to screeching about how I’m doing it all wrong, or badly, or in some way other than I should? I know I’m on the right fucking track. When EW [presuming he refers to ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY] writes you off as a loon, that’s a badge of honor. Why be like everyone else when you can be bold and stand apart? Good or bad, be remembered for doing it your way."