Finegan quotes Alison & then adds:
>
><< For me,
> creative activity (as opposed to the writing I do in
> my professional life) is more *listening* to something
> faint and subtle than wilfully generating product, and
> when I can't hear anything I *really* can't hear
> anything, and I know it. And to "make something up"
> to fill in the silence seems an insult to the creative
> endeavour, which for me is definitely about "telling
> the truth" at a level that runs below the surface
> frazzle of the conscious mind. I can't always do it,
> but I know when I have and when I haven't, and work I
> produce that doesn't tell the truth at this level
> always ends up being discarded. Not to mention
> filling me with self-loathing >>
>
>I'm not certain one shouldn't suspect (mistrust) the poems
>one "hears inside" oneself as much as the poems
>one "invents willfully." I do endorse the discarding. I get
>the sense sometimes that poems are being published
>without discernment, willy-nilly, throw it up against the wall
>(of cyberspace or print media) and see if it sticks. Writer's
>block may be a bad thing...but writer's reticence
>isn't.
but Alison didn't actually say she was listening to what she 'heard inside
herself' (& in putting those marks up I guess I creatively misquote too).
but instead said she was '*listening* to something
> faint and subtle,' perhaps a very different thing. Having read some of
>her peotry, I would say she knows what such listening can be. For me, it
>involves listening to the language itself, hoping to allow it some say in
>the necessarily collaborative act that writing can be...
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
(h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
Although they are
Only breath, words
which I command
are immortal
Sappho (Mary Barnard trans)
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