Just come from class, preceded by an hour in the Woodberry Poetry Room listening to recordings of everyone from Tennyson (the first recording of a poet EVER) to Frank O'Hara. As I was hearing tales of Amy Lowell leaving her cigars to the library and Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop corresponding about things they had read and written there, I was feeling jealous that I am not a poet and do not live this life.
Then in class the youngest member asked our venerated professor whether she, too, is a poet. There followed a really interesting tale in which she told how she did write poetry, between the ages of 6 and 26; it was "adequate," she said, with all the figures of thought and figures of speech, with rhyme and meter and structure, because she "knew how to do that sort of thing," but it was never really poetry. And then when she was 26, in graduate school at Harvard, she was at a party with-- and here she wasn't certain, but thought it was Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and Elizabeth Bishop-- and she gave them a similar answer when they asked if she was a poet. She confessed to feeling that her lack of success writing poetry was a failure, a fault; that if she had tried harder, been less lazy, she might have been able to be a poet.
They laughed, she said, and said something about how if she were a poet, she would not be ABLE to stop; she would suffer all kinds of ailments if she did not write poetry. "The muse will not let her own go," they said; there is terrible fallout if you dam up the creative force of whatEVER it is you are supposed to do. She is not a poet because she CAN'T be a poet.
Poets, she said (echoing Coleridge), inhabit the imaginative plane, such that when they are called back to this world of reality, they experience it as a disruption.
She does not inhabit that plane, but the analytical one, and that is where she has made her way, and done so loving poetry all the time. It is nothing to feel guilty about, she insists-- remember that terrible fallout.
Excellent food for thought as I consider teaching Creative Writing next year, and wonder what right I have to do so, when I am not myself a writer. But my gift is also analysis, reading the patterns cast on the screen, and that I can use to read, to critique, to give feedback, to find and help patch holes and gaps.
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