There's a Leunig cartoon of two men begging. One has a sign saying "I am
blind". The other has a sign saying "I can see".
Which is something of the urgency in writing which moves me. It's hard
to write what is perceived, within and without the self (and these things
are inextricably linked). If it's done well (Mandelstam, Trakl, Clare,
Rimbaud, Hopkins, Rilke, to name a few of my own favourites) it makes
something luminous, extraordinary, enlarging.
Poetry is the hardest thing to write, and the fruit of most striving is
failure. I keep hearing this is a bad thing, somehow elitist. I don't
think it is: when I read a poem that manages this most difficult thing,
it is to me a joyous occasion, a gift: not a consolation or compensation,
but a reminder of what it is to be alive, the risk, the price, the
beauty, the pain of that beauty.
Most poets lead pretty banal lives. One of the dilemmas of art is that
it takes a lot of work, time and staring into space to make it well,
which leaves the problem of making a living if you choose to do that, for
whatever dumb reason you do. The result is usually poverty of one kind
or another, which might be picturesque to read about but is hardly
interesting for the povertee. And is also very common. Suffering? Who
would want to be Dostoevski? Or Trakl? Or the man who walks down my
street muttering, sucking his hands? No one in their right mind. I read
recently a description of Heine, when he had lost his: I haven't read
many sadder things. Like the t-shirts say, shit happens.
Best
Alison
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