2/09/2009

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.

2 comments:

daniela elza said...

I have been having such conversations lately. Are you born a good reader? Or do you learn along the way? Are you born a poet, or can you become one along the way? And I am left with the impression that we are still under the impression that we are born with it. Which really gives a lot of people the permission to feel sorry for themselves instead of
get down to it.

Read read read, write write write.
And, I would add, careful who you hang out with. I have heard some horror stories coming out of Creative writing departments. Catching the wrong kind of bugs, germs. Post partum depressions, stress dis-orders. hmmm. . . .

Rob Taylor said...

I agree with you Daniela, that you aren't born with it - maybe some people are, but I don't think it's necessary (hopefully, at least, because I don't think I was born with it!).

I was terribly bored and disinterested with almost all poetry for the first 20+ years of my life (I think only Robert Frost and Paul Simon lyrics interested me in high school), and didn't start writing or reading poetry actively until halfway through University.

Still, I thought then that I was starting pretty young - now I see all these poets who say they were writing at seven or eight or something like that, which just seems insane to me.

I'm sure there are many things I've missed out on by not taking English or creative writing courses, but I know that, to compensate for that lacking, I've worked a lot harder than I would have - which seems in many ways more valuable.

Still, I've already watched about 12 YouTube videos today, so I've got a lot more learning to do...