The Art Of A Rebel

Maya Deren

I will mix all your opinions

with the tobacco in this cigarette

and taste the smoke as I watch them burn.

I am a woman whose gender

knows the patience of birthing,

yet you ask….no, you demand

I create according to your

formula of immediacy.

Art is not a crying infant taught

to walk in a single day...It is

an open wound carved by devotion

until it speaks its completion.

Creativity whored to profit

sacrifices its vision to explanation.

I prefer the wind, the human body,

a rose to fill the silence with the

poetry of movement.

I choose independence over the

collar Hollywood would place

around my neck…Cinema should

be a medium for fine-art not

the regurgitation of mediocrity.

©Susie Clevenger 2014

Maya Deren was one of the most important American experimental filmmakers and entrepreneurial promoters of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. She was critical of Hollywood's monopoly over cinema and was quite verbal about it. She chose the freedom of independent film over the moneyed machine of traditional cinema. 

Written for Real Toads Bits of Inspiration ~ Maya Deren