The title is my recollection of an oft-told story re: Picasso's "Guernica." It seems a Nazi officer saw this enormous (and, frankly, ugly) painting and asked the artist who was responsible for it.
The story goes that Maestro Pablo calmly replied as he did to imply that the Nazi "practice bombing" of innocent civilians during the Spanish Civil War was responsible for the carnage his canvas captured so memorably.
We call "Guernica" art not because it's beautiful -- it isn't. We call it art because Picasso used his Cubist aesthetic toward something that really mattered: a protest over an insanely cruel act that tragically presaged so many, many more. And because he did it so sucessfully that he could even insult a Nazi officer and get away with it.
And that's kind of what I meant last time about a developing a personal aesthetic. What I meant by that is not some "philosophy of art" that can be used to either deny the worth of what you're doing or to affirm some High Leader's "cult of personality."
Whether it's "art for art's sake" or a bust of Lenin looking like a bald, mustachioed Superman, it's not coming from a personal aesthetic. (Or Stalin, or Mao, or Saddam Hussein, or {insert name here}.)
What I did mean by the term is simply this: a working philosophy of what you're doing as a poet, and why.
But just remember: it can cost you.
What do I mean by that? Think Federico Garcia Lorca.
Who's that? Try "Take This Waltz."
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