Writing Problems: Perseverance

I have often written in The Sharpener that poetry can never come from the center. It can only come from the periphery. My own tastes in art, including poetry, favor the left-of-center or avant-garde. Avant-garde expression eventually becomes garde, or mainstream. Thus, the artists have to continue becoming peripheral and avant-garde. 

The only way to keep pushing into the wilderness, to find the expression never before discovered, is to first admit that writers don’t know anything. A writer’s only job is to describe things truthfully and accurately. 

Charlie Parker (1920-1955) is the example I often return to. In 1946, Parker went from New York to California to tour, but he miscalculated how much more expensive drugs were in Los Angeles compared to New York. 

When he ran out of money, he became chronically depressed, was homeless, and was committed to Camarillo State Mental Hospital. Despite these problems, Parker had a vision to combine his innovation of Black avant-garde music, Be-Bop, with Western classical. Known as Charlie Parker with Strings, this experiment became a huge pop hit.

He was on television, he toured France and Sweden, he was broadcast live on coast-to-coast radio, he recorded with Arturo Toscanini’s NBC Orchestra, and he was booked at the Apollo Theater every single day from 9 am until 2 am the next day through the summer and most of the fall of 1950.