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NauenThen

Sentimental

"Much of art is the struggle to make emotion less embarrassing," Douglas Crase writes in an essay called "The Leftover Landscape. "Camp brings love down to size, kitsch turns it rancid, but an artist somehow refines what was merely endurable until it becomes a surprise to be enjoyed."

I've always thought that my work is a constant attempt to get as close to commonplace feeling as possible without crossing the line into sentimentality. Commonplace? True? Shared? I'm not sure—it's not pin-downable. To say it (whatever "it" may be) as plainly as possible without sounding like a greeting card.

Update: I just found this quote from Randall Jarrell about John Crowe Ransom & felt it was part of the same discussion: "He was writing in an age in which the most natural feeling of tenderness, happiness, or sorrow was likely to be called sentimental; consequently he needed a self-protective rhetoric as the most brutal or violent of poets did not."
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