from “The Triggering Town”
Once a spectator said, after Jack Nicklaus had chipped a shot
in from a sand trap, “That’s pretty lucky.” Nicklaus is supposed
to have replied, “Right. But I notice the more I practice, the
luckier I get.” If you write often, perhaps every day,
you will stay in shape and will be better able to receive those
good poems, which are finally a matter of luck, and get them down.
Lucky accidents seldom happen to writers who don’t work. You will
find that you may rewrite and rewrite a poem and it never seems
quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you
wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem.
Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems.
The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease
of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones,
nothing will come. Get to work.
***
…your job is to be honest and try not to be too boring. However,
if you must choose between being eclectic and various or being
repetitious and boring, be repetitious and boring. Most good
poets are, if read very long at one sitting.
***
It is easier to write, and far more rewarding when you can ignore
relative values and go with the flow and thrust of the language. That’s
why Auden said that poets don’t take things as seriously as other people.
…
By now you may be thinking, doesn’t this lead finally to amoral
and shallow writing? Yes it does, if you are amoral and shallow.
I hope it will lead you to yourself and the way you feel. All poets
I know, and I know plenty of them, have an unusually strong moral sense,
and that is why they can go into the cynical world of the
imagination and not feel so threatened that they become impotent.
There’s fear sometimes involved but also joy, an exhilaration that can’t
be explained to anyone who has not experienced it. Don’t
worry about morality. Most people who worry about morality ought to.
Add comment July 23rd, 2004