A Poet Reflects

“I like what I do.  Some writers have said in print that they hated writing and it was just a chore and a burden. I certainly don’t feel that way about it.  Sometimes it’s difficult.  You know, you always have this image of the perfect thing which you can never achieve, but which you never stop trying to achieve.  But I think … that’s your signpost and your guide. You’ll never get there, but without it you won’t get anywhere.”

—Cormac McCarthy,  interview with Oprah Winfrey, June 1, 2008

“You run into people who want to write poetry who don’t want to read anything in the tradition.  That’s like wanting to be a builder but not finding out what different kinds of wood you use.”

—Gary Snyder

“The first discipline is the realization that there is a discipline—that all art begins and ends with discipline, than any art is first and foremost a craft.”

—Archibald MacLeish

“Artists often, if not always, find themselves working with tricky tools and intractable materials, with their inherent quirks, resistances, inertias, irritations.  Sometimes we damn the limits, but without them art is not possible.  They provide us with something to work with and against.

In practicing our craft we surrender, to a great extent, to letting the materials dictate the design.  The viscosity of paint, the tensile strength and wolf tones of violin strings, the egos of actors—all these foibles and limitations can be seen as the discipline that evokes creativity.  Language itself is a medium rich in hindrances and resistances, as T. S. Eliot writes:

                                                 Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.  Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them.”

—Stephen Nachmanovitch, from “The Power of Limits” in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art (Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc., 1990)
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“Some poems are very hard to write, must be carved into granite with a feather.  Others burst out of the head armored and ready to command a chariot drawn by swans.”

—Dean Young