Please sponsor my 5k swim coming up in April and help support Marie Curie Cancer Care, an organisation which provides home nursing care to people with terminal illnesses.

Some of the discussion around the long-overdue arrest of Roman Polanski I take very personally indeed. The man who raped me was an artist—a poet, not famous, not great, not even as well published as I am, but an artist nonetheless, so when I hear people suggesting that an artist’s work can somehow expiate the crimes he has committed against another human being, I have to consider it from that angle. Let’s say the man who raped me wrote a collection of poetry so remarkable that even I felt the need to learn from it in order to improve my poetics. This would have to be a truly astounding work because I’m not all that skilled at compartmentalization. Based on my knowledge of his work with its rhetoric-pretending-to-be-important, it is highly unlikely that he could ever produce anything like that. Still, if he did: would it change anything he did to me? Would it make up for any of it? For the trauma? For the pain? For the loss of my sense of autonomy?

Of course not. Nothing that man could ever do would change the reality of what he did. To suggest that a cruelty committed against an individual can be canceled out through the some more generalized set of good works is to engage in a sort of moral bookkeeping that is fundamentally inhumane.

But what effect then does committing such crimes have on the value of an individual’s work? It’s very easy to paint a line between the life and the work and to say that one should not impact the other, but if you do that, then you construct a second identity for an artist in which s/he is a pure avatar of ideas. The problem with that (besides all the general issues with constructs) is that when an artist goes to create, they still have all of the rest of who they are hanging about them. Experiences, beliefs, attitudes: those don’t change just because someone has put on their art-making galoshes today. To actively avoid applying knowledge of those factors to the evaluation and understanding of a work of art may make certain cases simpler or at least more comfortable, but it is as much an error as ignoring any other aspect of context would be.

When the man who raped me uses a word like “sex”, it has tremendously different meanings from when the man who loves me uses it. I’m not sure that should only be the case when I read or hear it. I don’t believe that interpretations from my position should be waved aside as biased (as if any human were ever purely objective) or invalid in a broader sense.

But it’s messy, right?

That’s part of how you know it’s valid. A legitimate consideration of art as a human endeavor should be messy because humans are messy. Artists are messy. Audiences are messy. The creative process is messy. To try to present a clean and simple picture of any of that is a disservice not only to art but also to the experience of being human and all the horrible and wonder things that entails.

Try having a conversation with someone without making any eye contact. Describe how it feels.

If you normally do not make eye contact, either try doing so or have a conversation with someone or something that has no eyes. A tree, for instance.

Sleep with your head in the wrong direction.

Record your dreams.

If you don’t dream, why not?

Once upon a time, writing in all lower case was rebellious, a way of demonstrating that you didn’t care about standards someone else had set and that perhaps you wanted to create your own more meaningful standards. This may still be true in some contexts, but poetry is not one of them. Though there will always be a few who insist upon “proper” prose capitalization in poetry ( just as there are still those who think we should all be writing in left-flush traditional forms or who assume that anything with a scattered/shattered appearance cannot be carefully crafted otherwise), poetry that sticks to the lower case is a well-accepted mode, even if it is not the standard.

My default way of writing poetry is to use mostly lower case, turning to upper case primarily with those words that are usually capitalized no matter where they appear in a sentence. This includes “I”. While one of the justifications I have heard for lowercase “i’ is that it suggests that the self is not so important, I suspect that by departing from established prose rules for capitalization, it actually draws more attention to the self; in poetry, where it might not be noticed so readily, it still suggests the desire to make the self seem smaller, which is still an interest in the self. If the self is truly unimportant, how the first-person pronoun is used will reflect that regardless of case.

My use of “I” is similar to the way I treat other typically capitalized words: I capitalize them unless I have reason not to. Such reasons include differentiating voices in a poem, indicating a change of attitude, and showing a different sense of a term. A Christ-ian and a christian are quite different things, for example.

There are other situations in which I may use upper case. When I feel that the possibility of a new sentence needs to be emphasized but that a period would be too strong (which happens fairly often since periods have such a profound rhythmic effect that I rarely use them), I may use a capital letter. It’s also a method of emphasis or of suggesting that something be taken as a name when it might not normally be. Though I could use additional capitalization, even all caps, to indicate a different voice, I have rarely actually done so.

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Ask the sky what you should write.

When it doesn’t answer, make something up.