We can't interrogate the world without ugly
On ugly's power within our art
I’ll be joining Julie Gammack, the founder of the Iowa Writer’s Collaborative, on her podcast on Monday, May 6, at 12 p.m. CT, to talk more about the philosophy behind my Substack and my work at CultureALL. Subscribe to her Substack to get the Zoom link to the conversation.
In a conference room with bare walls and an elevated stage, under harsh lighting, seated at round tables dispersed throughout the room with writers of various experience, Jennifer L. Knox. taught me about the power of ugly.
How often do you think about the word ugly? Is ugly the bowl cut your mom gave you in 1988? Is it the gastric present your cat left you on the carpet? Kim Reynolds’ legacy in Iowa?
“Your brain is far more engaged with ugly.”
I think a lot about the ugliness that we let happen, the ugliness that we think of as inevitable but is really human-made and perpetuated. Jennifer, an author of five books of poetry and a teacher in central Iowa, thinks a lot about it, too. She thinks about how it can change our experience of a piece of art. How it can capture the complexities of being a human.
Jennifer’s workshop was a part of the 2nd annual Poetry Palooza, a festival celebrating poetry and aiming to recapture the spirit of the Des Moines National Poetry Festival, defunct since the aughts. The theme this year was “Poetry of Place and Echoes of Earth.” I didn’t feel much inspired by setting as I walked into the Grand View University Student Center amidst the dreary, muted gray sky and drowning wind inherent to Iowa in April.
The workshop began with an explanation of the difference in brain waves when we look at something beautiful versus when we look at something ugly. Beauty is a straight line, easy to fathom, your brain on autopilot. Ugly is asymmetry, a sporadic wave of activity, your brain trying to make sense of the wrongness it’s consuming.
“Your brain is far more engaged with ugly,” Jennifer said. “You get the benefit of surprise, which increases the intensity of all feelings by 400%. It’s the jackpot of emotions when we’re engaging with art.”
I’m struck by the word engage here. We are never just consuming art; we are giving it our context and taking its right back. We are letting it alter our brain waves and shift our perspectives on the world.
The art I have left feeling intensely uncomfortable and deeply changed by is the art that explores the ugliness of the human spirit. The art that shows us the people to avoid loving and the people to avoid becoming.
Jeannie Vanasco’s “Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was A Girl,” where she interviews her childhood friend turned rapist who assaulted her when she was blackout drunk. She tries to comprehend his incomprehensible choices, how a person could put on such ugliness for a moment and how that moment looked to him. It was an unsettling look into how the people we know can transform into something unfathomable, something they don’t even understand themselves.
In the pilot of “The Sinner,” Jessica Biel portrays a suburban mother quietly struggling with the loneliness of managing a family. An idyllic day at the beach with her husband and son turns into a horror show when she suddenly walks over to a man and stabs him to death. The camera’s perspective is in the thick of the chaos, her knife plunging into his neck so viscerally, her husband pulling her away and screaming “what are you doing?!” over and over into her face, the other beachgoers screaming and running in the background. The scene felt so realistic that I was on edge the entire next day at work, seeing it over and over.
“Ugly has a place. Ugly has a time. Ugly has a use, too.”
Jennifer defined ugly as something eliciting the opposite response of beauty—recoiling, grimacing, screaming. Ugly is asymmetrical; it has too much or too little of something. Ugly is emotionally complex. Ugly is a reality we don’t want to face.
She said this to me in an email:
“Ugly is the ultimate counter-ballast to the more ‘expected’ moves we make in a poem out of habit, fear, etc. Students have often told me they're afraid to deviate from the consensus, from moves that feel/seem more acceptable. ‘Don't rock the boat.’ Art should stir the reader and the artist; ugly isn't just not bad, it's a great way to make your poems more resonant, memorable, stirring, unpredictable, and human.”
It’s the art that interrogates the complexity of our collective experience that resonates the most. That makes us turn to the movie-goer next to us to see if they just saw the same thing you did, or if everyone else at the concert is remembering their first heartbreak, too.
The six featured poets gathered on stage directly after the workshops for a panel on “eco-poetry,” a word I quickly found I did not understand. I thought of poetry about nature, intricate descriptions of verdant leaves and sprawling mountains. The type of writing that, quite honestly, I find boring. I much prefer to read about humans and our vast, bizarre motivations. Which, apparently, is eco-poetry.
Camille Dungy described eco-poems as having “direct interaction with the Anthropocene,” differing from nature poetry by “taking into account the human element of our ecosystem.” Deb Marquart described this idea of the interaction of humanity and nature: “There is nothing under the sun, including the sun, that is not environment. We are porous and subject to everything around us.”
Nasrullah Mambrol writes in “Literariness” that “eco-poetics investigates how the human is situated within its habitat.”
I think we all long to live in our habitat without any interference from the ugly. It’s an understandable yet ultimately futile desire, a world that likely will never exist. Ugly has a place. Ugly has a time. Ugly has a use, too, especially in art—to reveal the complexities underlying our human relation to the ecosystem around us.
I stopped Jen before the poet panel to get her email; I had already started journaling and trying to make sense of ugly’s place in my own work. She was incredibly kind enough to answer my follow-up questions. I wanted to understand how she conceptualized ugliness, how the context around ugliness shifts our reactions.
She shared:
“For me, apparent ugliness is an epiphany that blooms when I actually connect to the world—I'm not just pretending to—I look around, and suddenly I see a new ugly. Mycelium is the base organism from which mushroom spores sprout. Mycorrhizal mycelium brings water to a tree’s roots in exchange for sugar, produced in the tree during photosynthesis. Beneath the Malheur National Forest in Oregon, Armillaria Ostoyae mycelium (AKA, the Humongous Fungus) is the largest contiguous living organism on the planet, measuring 2,385 acres across.
So when I say ‘connect to the world,’ maybe what I'm really tapping into is a human mycelium that reveals our interconnectedness.”
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Thank you, Macey! PS I saw you at Poetry Palooza briefly and then lost you in the crowd.
Maybe because ugliness engages the mind more than beauty, people tend to fixate on their flaws rather than their image as a whole. Some of the most handsome and beautiful people I know want to change something of their features, when everyone around them sees their beauty as ethereal. It was nice reading about the differences in brain waves, it's something I've never heard of before, and feel ever more enlightened. Thank you.