I’ve been thinking more about the article on ideas, cliques, and innovation that I mentioned a few days ago. Do the tactics of innovation in business apply to the arts? It’s a truism in technology that if you want something new done you should find a new person to do it, in apparent recognition of Ruef’s thesis that people are more innovative when they are new to a particular environment. At the same time, long-term employees can enhance an organization in many other vitally important ways, making it strong enough for the new breed to succeed in their “out of the box” endeavors. It is clearly the case in business that many members of each group do not value members of the opposite. These two simplistic categories are, in the real world, represented by a spectrum with many clusters of folks along the way.

This strikes me as an apt comparison to the “business” of poetic invention.

At one end of the spectrum we have the unchanging mass of those who have come before, as synthesized by a somewhat fluid canon. In the middle are the “conventional” poets of various stripes who are pretty directly tied to tradition (even in non-traditional forms, such as free verse), many of whom are producing good, great, and even stellar work, but not work that is particularly new. On the other end are the avant-garde, the folks thinking outside the box, the poets on the bleeding edge for whom doing something new and different has an intrinsic value. As William Wallace would rather die on his feet than live on his knees, these are the poets who would rather try something that has never been done and fail than succeed on more traditional terms.

Too much groupthink– which usually occurs courtesy of being too comfortable in one group or another– can be fatal for a creative effort, just as it can be fatal to a business’ bottom line. I see little of value, whatever that value might be, coming from the traditionalists in their bow ties for whom poetry died with the rise of Eliot. But I see equally little coming from the select group of worshipping the new for whom lyrical force, sustained ideas, and intelligible syntax are vestiges of a system of communication they believe oppressive to their exciting ideas.

Where things are interesting is on the fringes of the groups, where there is communication and exchange back and forth. Traditional forms are reworked, conventional narratives twisted– but not so far that their shapes become lost. Poets bounce between poetry slams and poetry lists, they expand their circle beyond their comfortable coterie of like-minded friends to the benefit of both groups: the avant-garde becomes a little more intelligible while the comfortably modern lyric poets become a little less predictable. That’s where the good stuff is happening.

The issue of groupthink is important to the creative arts because so much of the lifeforce that drives them is derived from academia, where resistance to change is often the norm (for reasons both good and bad). As a student, I both loved and hated the artificial community that was spontaneously generated by the English students. I liked it because every artist needs a peer group. But much of that need stems from a desire to be comfortable– a desire that is understandable, but can be anathema to being creative. The same thing happens online with mailing lists, forums, and weblogs. They can be wonderful places to hang out and interact with others, but too often it is others who are like you (and when they aren’t, the inevitable and exciting friction too often turns to– or is interpreted as– hostility). This environment becomes like a played out mine where there is just enough gold to keep the sluice-boxes shaking, but no one holds out any real hope that big nuggets are going to turn up, or that a tangible seam of gold will be discovered.

Breaking free of this stasis is hard. Struggling too much can even be counter-productive. We should be free to observe that someone posted some drivel to a mailing list just as we should be free to express our praise for a great weblog entry. The first action shouldn’t preclude camraderie and the second shouldn’t ensure friendship. And trying to change the medium where we congregate is a fool’s errand– the frustration of trying to make a group stay “on topic” will rob you of any creative impulse… and make for a pretty boring place anyway.

The only real answer I can come up with is to not be afraid of conflict, but at the same time not get too angry or jealous at the cliquishness. Express opinion but value usefulness. And if it gets too easy, recognize that I’m probably in the wrong place.