[lit-ideas] Re: FW: Re: Poetry and Madness
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2006 17:47:44 -0700
Stan Spiegel a dit:
It's a nice idea, Robert, to recommend that Irene immerse herself in
all the great literature of the ages -- poetry, literature,
non-fiction -- before she picks up a pen and starts writing. But what
the heck is the good stuff she should take a look at? Does she have
to go back and take another degree in English and American
literature? After all, most of the "stuff" out there is not very good.
I suppose you owe me a definition of 'stuff.' Most of the stuff in the
racks by
the supermarket checkout isn't very good although some of it's entertaining.
One learns to write sentences by seeing and _hearing_ how other people write
sentences. This of course might raise the question: whose sentences? But it's
no mystery who the great dead writers of English prose and poetry are, and it
isn't all that hard to find who the promising live ones are, and the same is
true for works in other languages, about which I'm not competent to speak.
Frankly, I think the more she knows about good poetry, the less
likely that she will do any writing. It gets intimidating. She might
think: who am I to compete with Yeats and Frost and Ferlinghetti?
Well, we disagree. Whether reading Yeats and Frost and Ferlinghetti
intimidates
her is a matter of her own psychological makeup. There's no law that says that
people who read Yeats, etc., are so stunned and depressed they give up doing
anything of their own. (They may even be, to use an old-fashioned word,
inspired.) I didn't say that Irene should ape anyone. I said, or meant to say,
that she should get those speech patterns, those rhythms, in her head. I meant
it. (One might achieve the same end by paying really close attention to some
regional dialect and trying to understand what's distinctive about it.
We don't
make up our own natural language, and those who grow up around competent
speakers will turn out to be more at home in the language than will
someone who
has to learn a language by memorizing rules and parts of speech. If you strike
out on your own as an infant, you really may end up saying 'Bar, bar, bar,'
throughout your career.
Instead of immersing herself in great poetry, I think she should just
plunge in and start playing with words and ideas. Maybe pick up a
book (Eric suggested one, I suggested one) and do a little reading,
then try out some ideas, images, metaphors on paper.
Nothing I said is incompatible with one's reading the book Eric mentioned.
But
my own view is that such a book cannot help one who is not already a nascent
poet--and one doesn't get to that stage in one's career by memorizing rules.
'Just do it' is a slogan for the timid, but it gives no guidance until and
unless one has a rough notion of what it would be to do what one is now too
reticent or hung up to do. One is only original in light of some model from
which originality departs.
Robert Paul
Reed College
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