It's Not Just You: Artists, Alienation, and Getting On With It
Scott Cairns
July 1, 1999
Its Not Just You: Artists, Alienation, and Getting On With ItScott CairnsThe archetype of the alienated artist has held long-standing and dearly treasured hegemony for most of this century. And it has provided a fairly ubiquitous scaffolding for many other, equally long-standing and widely embraced commonplaces about who artists are (disaffected rebels), how they relate to their immediate cultures (in corrective antagonism), and even how they look (I'm sure you know the uniform by now). Dear as these notions are to us—especially during our sophomore years (which can span a lifetime, by the way)—they have more to do with making excuses than they have with making art. This is not to say that alienation is avoidable. On the contrary, it is a rite of passage through which every adolescent (and certainly every nascent artist) must pass. But the issue is just that: the artist really must pass through it. Those who don't manage to make it all the way through risk being deluded into thinking that their art is rejected because the world is just not ready for their light, preferring darkness. The world's preference for darkness over light has been well documented, but it is probably not the primary reason why such art is rejected, or, far more likely, ignored.My past experience—both my earlier experience as an adolescent poet and my more recent experience as a teacher of adolescent as well as more accomplished poets—suggests that early work is rejected because it is mostly crap, necessary crap, admittedly, but genuine crap. And I'm not being coy or merely rhetorically canny when I say it is necessary. It is, after all, real work and—whether it occurs in the form of poetry, fiction, photography, painting, you ...
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