Frank O'Hara wrote:
I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."

"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

This comes from the New York School of poets--closely related to the Abstract Expressionist movement--and in my view is largely responsible for removing craft from art and replacing it with excessive pretension.  I hate it, and I hate the fact that I know I've been influenced by it--and that part of me loves it.

The phrase "I am a poet" jars me with nausea, and the later "I am a real poet" makes my stomach churn.  I hate when people call me an “artist�? and to a lesser extent when people call my work “art�?.  Unfortunately, sometimes there aren't other words that express the position properly.

I like to call myself “creative artisan,�? but that sounds pretentious, too.  More often I consider myself an entertainer.  This allows a wider and more realistic perspective on why I make photographs (ironically, I insist that I “make photographs�? rather than “take pictures�?).  That said, I'll have to paraphrase what the poet (heh) Greg Glazner said about being entertaining (sadly, my short stack of literary magazines is unGoogleable):  “We should be entertaining like Beethoven's 5th Symphony rather than entertaining like Married With Children.�?

I am not a poet, I am a photographer.
Why?  I think I would rather be
a poet, but I am not.  Well,

Poetry has an advantage in its uselessness.  Poems won't sell magazines or toothpaste or iPods.  Photographs are too commercially useful to be pure art, and that is possibly what makes me comfortable making them.  Poems are nourishing, but they rarely put food on the table.  Photographs, can be nourishing, but when even when they fail at that, their accessibility allows them to be marketable.  Kids gotta eat.

Lucky kids get to eat pie.

I have a bear that keeps my pretentiousness in check.  He came from some forgotten charity and reminds me not to take photography so seriously.  Such seriousness ruin poetry for me, and it takes a healthy dose of silliness to remind me that we aren't saving the world here; we're just trying to keep passing the open windows.

In "The Hotel New Hampshire" John Irving wrote:
This is an old joke. There was a street clown called King of the Mice: he trained rodents, he did horoscopes, he could impersonate Napoleon, he could make dogs fart on command. One night he jumped out his window with all his pets in a box. Written on the box was this: "Life is serious, but art is fun!" I hear his funeral was a party. A street artist had killed himself. Nobody had supported him but now everybody missed him. Now who would make the dogs make music and the mice pant? The bear knows this too: It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious. Prostitutes know this too.

So why do I post here so much?  I blame you for reading this and the 9,999 that came before it.

Poetry has an advantage in its uselessness.  Poems won't sell magazines or toothpaste or iPods.

Actually, masquerading as "copy", it does.

Then too, what is not a poem?

commart wrote:

Actually, masquerading as "copy", it does.

Then too, what is not a poem?

What is not a poem is not art.  Both are equally undefinable, yet we define them anyway, as I will below.

Copy is not poetry.  Copy may use poetical devices, but it is a greater intent that makes a poem.  When the intent is to move merchandise, it is not poetry.

Brian Diaz wrote:

What is not a poem is not art.  Both are equally undefinable, yet we define them anyway, as I will below.

Copy is not poetry.  Copy may use poetical devices, but it is a greater intent that makes a poem.  When the intent is to move merchandise, it is not poetry.

You college kids..

If you have to define here's one both broad and simple.

"Once you brand art as 'art' it loses its soul..."  - the artist formerly known as Fud.

WG Rowland wrote:
"Once you brand art as 'art' it loses its soul..."  - the artist formerly known as Fud.

But if it doesn't have a soul, is it art?

Is this one of those things like where if you look directly at it, it disappears?  What are those things?

Brian Diaz wrote:

But if it doesn't have a soul, is it art?

Is this one of those things like where if you look directly at it, it disappears?  What are those things?

I don't know what they are..  But they're beautiful, if you squint just right you can almost see them out of the corner of your eye, and they matter more than every thing that's ever been define put together..

When the intent is to move merchandise, it is not poetry.

"Been a long time, been a long lonely, lonely, lonely time" has traveled from driving the parent's mad to moving Cadillacs.

I'm trying to take cultural, ethical, and moral considerations, including intentions, out of my own photo review process because each involves judging something socially that needs response on, I think, a more purely aesthetic basis.

Also . . . there's all the difference in the world between writing poems (or composing anything else) and reading them.

Brian Diaz wrote:
Life is serious, but art is fun!

In that case,  I choose fun.  Seriously.   

And  I might add I am glad to have the cliff notes (oooops  Brian D. notes)  of the
9,999 prior  posts of the accumlated 14,k plus comments.

but then,  I'm not a very poetic Poetry Critic.  I just add a bit of vermouth to my humor from time to time.  Just a tiny bit.  Don't want to have it be too dry, but still dry is nice.