Curses for Your Sake
Curses for Your Sake is the first volume of poetry by Javen Tanner. This chapbook contains fourteen poems that traverse a landscape of contemporary wandering and rumination. The collection contrasts relationships in the family with observations of the outside world. Hardcover limited edition and commercial paperback edition.
Limited edition no longer available
Paperback edition available
2006
Entries (RSS)
July 24th, 2007 at 3:28 pm
When Curses for Your Sake came out, we had a couple of readings in New York. Javen Tanner read selections of the chapbook and described how a few of the works came to be. We also had a tasting of chocolate from all over the world. (We call that a hook.)
Poetry is like chocolate, I think. It’s concentrated, intense, memorable, even trippy. And bad poetry is sort of like bad chocolate, right?
Do you read poetry? What do you get from it?
September 16th, 2007 at 1:46 pm
What a strange Sunday morning. I’m so anxious. You’d think there would be some measure of satisfaction. I recently won Best Actor at the New York International Independent Film Festival, for my role in a film that won the Founders Choice for Best Picture–the first LDS film ever to be an official selection of that particular festival. The film, “Return With Honor” (originally just called “The Return”) also won a Gold Remi at the Worldfest Film Festival in Houston. It was released in theatres this weekend, and I stood for hours signing autographs and smiling. Add to that the copies of Irreantum and Dialogue that lay on the side table (which is to the side of me). One has a thoughtful review of “Curses for Your Sake,” and the other has one of my poems. Even Doug Talley, who wrote a lovely review for “Curses” in Meridian, has come back into my life–his daughter happens to be in the acting class I am teaching at BYU. And then, by pure coincidence, The Good Samaritan (a film I did back in college) just aired on BYU TV as I sat worrying.
I have come to believe that my generation of Mormon artist is the most alienated generation of all–a grandiose statement, I know, but there you are. I have spent much of the last seven years since I left BYU for grad school largely avoiding any involvement in contemporary Mormon art while thinking about it daily. (I am, after all, a Mormon artist.) I have steered clear of auditioning for Mormon movies and plays, and I have never submitted my poetry to Mormon publications. But then I did audition for a Mormon film, and I said yes to having poems appear in two Mormon publications (Meridian and Dialogue). Enter anxiety.
But not for the snobby reasons you might think. Let’s go back to the point about alienation. I am alienated by Mormon pop…well, because it’s pop. And I’m not into pop. “Return With Honor,” in spite of its success in non-LDS circles, will still be regarded as Mormon pop. Arguments against pop always deteriorate into a question of taste (usually including accusations of snobbery, and then blah, blah, blah…). But pop is not the problem, I just don’t like it–generally speaking, of course. Pop has never threatened art the way people like me (i.e. people who, however deep down, think of themselves as serious artists) have sometimes claimed. In fact, I am far more alienated by what the previous generations of Mormon artists did in response to Mormon pop–they became academics.
I write this as a recovering academic. There is nothing more dangerous to great art than academia. I used to think the A. E. Housman character in Tom Stoppard’s “The Invention of Love” was wrong when he said you can’t be both an academic and an artist. I so wanted to be both. But after grad school, and then working professionally as poet and actor, I really believe it’s true. This is why I never wanted to be involved with Dialogue, Irreantum or Sunstone. I saw these publications as places where the so-called Mormon intelligentsia met. And the more I was steeped in making art, the more I saw intelligentsia as the enemy of art. It isn’t that those publications are bad in and of themselves, it is simply that artists should be wary of thinking like academics. By doing so, we have surrendered contemporary Mormon art to Mormon academia. It’s time to take it back.
Interestingly enough–and this is not meant to be a plug–I have found my one comfortable place in Mormon art in the Mormon Artists Group. A group that has no generational center, no geographical center, and no aesthetic center. No wonder I found myself here, seeking comfort, in the midst of such anxiety.
September 17th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
After years of thinking of poetry as a school subject which I had rather liked but not a daily pursuit, I was surprised to discover that when asked to name my ten favorite books, poetry got three places and that when I went to Korea for a year to teach English with a baggage weight limit, I included Curses for your Sake in my bags because, 1) it was small and 2) Javan’s poetry made me so happy or alive or aware that I wanted to read the poems over and over again.