An Outside Perspective on Claiming Your Artistic Turf

For a while, many months at that, I had thought this “Follow Your Art” endeavor was a music tour. That’s how it started out. At least, that’s how it was organized from the beginning. As I’ve progressed, I have seen it stop being in my mind what I thought it was and start to become … again in my mind, what it actually is now. It has gone from music tour to music journey and now it’s going from music journey to artistic platform. Follow Your Art.

What is a platform? I’m glad you asked. A platform, as Sage Cohen puts it in her article Why Poets need Platforms and How to Create One, “is the turf you name and claim as your area of writing expertise, and its everything you do to make that expertise visible.” Furthermore, she speaks on it being, “an organizing principle around which a poet’s many expressions of work revolve.” If you aren’t sure what an organizing principle is, you could say it’s the direction you set for the right course of action to take regarding your work. If it doesn’t tie into your organizing principle, you don’t take that action.

Now, with that being said, I want to make it very clear … I don’t think I’m not touring the world or at the very least traveling it. It’s a known. I am where I am, and I can’t physically be anywhere else. But with my mind in mind, I realize Follow Your Art is far more than just the journeying or the next destination or the next place I get to get up in front of people and share my works. It’s not superficial, although its far more cliche I’m sure to say it is far more than that. So … much more in fact, that it’s all of it. That is, it is all of it, plus, what is not offline. Plus, what is not in front of other people. Plus, even this blog post I’m sharing here. It’s the collection of writing including everything even not in writing that I’m doing, have done, and will have done that speaks to my ability to do this and to do this well that not only puts this in front of you but says, “this is something worth exploring. This is a direction worth going in. This is a movement worth making and an action worth taking.”

Now, I’m not saying there aren’t others who haven’t used this same phrase … but as an expression of my platform, Follow Your Art, I think this takes on a new strategy not only of how it is seen but how I see by virtue of what I’m looking at affecting the eyes and what’s coming in. I’m trying to capture something perhaps in a much different light. And not just what I’m doing but the totality of what is being done on this journey not only in the realm of the physical but in the realm of social media and what I choose to do and where I choose to go next with even my own personal website under Metalody Music that says, “I know what I’m doing,” or at the very least, one way or another, I’m going to figure it out. With that in mind, Follow Your Art becomes for me, if you haven’t figured it out already, more than just my tour or my journey … it’s my platform.