I'm trying to make it sound like it's fun

I’m talking to you guys, you know. I don’t talk like this to other poets that are friends of mine, that I’ve known for a long time. I show them my poem, they say, “That’s nice. I like the use of ‘of’ in the third line.” I feel pleased. I said to Dick Gallup, “You got any new poems?” He says, “Yeah.” I say, “Great.” Then I get to read them some time.

But I’m trying to talk to you about how to think about what you do. I don’t like aesthetics that tell you not to do much. Get your ass to work, is what I think one should do. We are Americans, right? We have to work – let’s discover, be pioneers, go to the moon...

The world is big enough to entertain all aesthetics. I think they are all interchangeable, like diseases. They’re communicable. Aesthetics will not help you write poems. I’m not trying to give you any aesthetics, I’m trying to tell you to get to work. I’m trying to make it sound like it’s fun. I’m saying, simply, that if you want to be a poet, you have to write a lot of poems. A lot of poems!...

You’re not going to write good poems unless you write a lot of poems, and you’re not going to write a lot of poems unless you write anything. That’s what I’m telling you. Write anything, and I suggest that you write it well, and the best way to write well it to not try to write well, but to just write. Almost every line that I’ve read by anybody when they were trying to write well was truly horrible, simply because most people hadn’t read enough poems and didn’t know really how to tell a good line from a bad one. The most fatal thing for a poet to do is to be poetic. It’s also utterly unnecessary. So you have to work that one out, too.



- Ted Berrigan, from a workshop he conducted in 1978, as found in Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action.