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Bukowski, so you want to be a writer?

Poetry Discussion of the Week: Purdyian Answer to Bukowski’s so you want to be a writer?

Poems rise not so much in response to present time, as even Rilke thought, but in response to other poems.

-- The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom

On Realizing He Has Written Some Bad Poems by Al Purdy

I am ashamed of you
my poems
you owe me something more
than you've given recently
my poems
you have forgotten your duty
which is to make me important
your function in this life
to march ahead of me
with fife and drum and skirling pipes
to encourage my own halting steps
my poems
your obligation is to cause people
to look at you and glimpse between your lines
indistinct and ambiguous my own face
enigmatic almost majestic certainly wise
my poems
your responsibility to lie about me and exaggerate me
allow me to bask in the esteem of a million readers
or a million in one
and so to shine under their focused intense regard
that my fossilized flesh will precede my dying
preclude my loving and replacing my actual living

......

my poems
you have betrayed your creator
i would discard you deny you condemn you
and since the life I have given you is not requited
the love I poured forth on you has not brought children
I will abandon you in some gutter blown by the wind
until the long rains beat on you and snow shall blur your meaning

......

my poems you have failed
but when I recovered from
this treachery to myself
I shall walk among the hills chanting
and celebrate my own failure
transformed to something else

in response to so you want to be a writer? by Charles Bukowski

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.

if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

So, what are your answers, would-be writers, writers-to-be, aspiring writers, published writers, or so-called writers-on-site?
_________________
I came, I saw, and I conquered

hahaview · 发表于: 星期日二月 08, 2009 9:39 am 发表主题:

The following asnwer is an excerpt from An Interview with Terry Barker on the Poetics of People’s Poetry: On Realizing He Has Written Some Bad Poems by ericcoliu:

Ericcoliu:

In his ‘On Realizing He Has Written Some Bad Poems,’ Al Purdy, Canada’s ‘Voice of the Land’ as the League of Canadian Poets called him, interrogates the failure of his poems for creating successful images of the self, medi(t)ates on the relationship between language and identity, and keeps on hoping that his bumbling but endearing failures and treacheries will in time be “transformed to something else.” This is not merely a hope dearly kept by Purdy himself, but also a hope collectively held on to by Canadians who care deeply for the future of Canadian poetry and also by all poets who try to enrich and improve their poetry writing.
_________________
I came, I saw, and I conquered

hahaview · 发表于: 星期一二月 09, 2009 9:03 am 发表主题:

Terry Barker:

What I was thinking of here is the remark of Eric Voegelin (in his Conversations given in Montreal) to the effect that he "trusted poetry". What he meant by this, I think, is that poets in their expressions are unable to falsify the experiences that are occuring in the "depth of their consciousnesses". To write at all , the individual must interact with this "depth" , and this interaction may involve a genuine "diving" down into the depth to find symbols that express/ represent one's experience, or may mimic this , for example, by "peopling" the depth with symbols of his/her own devising (like Carl Jung?), or positing processes in the depth( like Schelling ?). Purdy's poem describes a complex structure of consciousness, I think, that Voegelin calls "honest dishonesty". Purdy knows that he has written "some bad poems", but engages in a thought process (which he admits) that tries to make this series of symbols serve his purpose for them(i.e. to "make me important"). This leads him to "celebrate his failure" as if it were a success, which transforms the failure, as he says. The move is a variety of the Nietzschean "extending of forgiveness to oneself" strategy.

Purdy's work comes at the end of Canadian People's Poetry, I think, after the notion of "the people", both in the sense of the "common people", and in its meaning of a historically distinct people had atrophied in this country. Purdy is clearly trying to find some new meaning for the people, or, at least, for himself, and more or less declaring the impossibility of doing so.
_________________
I came, I saw, and I conquered

robarts

hahaview

ericcoliu · 发表于: 星期四二月 12, 2009 11:26 am 发表主题:

hahaview · 发表于: 星期四二月 26, 2009 5:43 pm 发表主题: