Hello writer! Here's a word for this new season of changes...
It's from James Fenton's "The Strength of Poetry" who writes: "There is no such thing as the artistic personality, not in poetry, not in the visual arts."
Maybe it's a good time to look at our motives. Fenton claims art is inseparable from personal uniqueness. The artist is known for the singularity of his/her point of view and divergent ways in which we refuse the conventionally radical and traditional roles available to us.
Here's my favorite line regarding our wish to evade the sufferings that go with failure: "But for a productive life, and a happy one, each failure must be felt and worked through. It must form part of the dynamic of your creativity."
A poet's uniqueness is not a quality that can be sought, says Fenton, and I (Marie) believe that includes all artists. "Writers who try to sound unique end up by sounding like some other writer whose uniqueness they envy."
I call this maturity vs. vanity. I recently wrote a very long piece on the renowned poet, Li-Young Lee (see the AWP Writer's Chronicle next issue), who told me that to him poetry in his life was like washing the floor, like everything else in life, no more valuable, no less. And the very wonderful and brilliant writer and poet, Sydney Lea, our Robert Frost heir apparent, lives his life first in love (love including every passion both negative and positive) with the world -- and the poems, essays, stories and novels flow from this point of his reality.
A Moralist critic like Fenton values poetic technique but is more excited about ideas and feeling in the work. No aesthete, Fenton, no looking toward art as a means of escape from the complexities and pain of reality.
To embrace our pain IS our reality. Can it be true that the strength of good writing is very much connected to and dependent upon the weaknesses of the writers? Can a fertile weakness be far more productive than strength? Fenton says yes. He is aghast at those writers who borrow the glamour of someone else's oppression, and who treat their work as something to be extolled.
I believe the more truthful we are in our work and in our examination of our lives and the world, the more we disdain pretension and material goals.
What is vanity, afterall, but ignorance?
Writing from the soul (forgive the cliche) means we enter the angst and the joy; we enter it all and we don't leave.
I'll close with this from William Wordsworth: "With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things."
A rich and rewarding writing winter to you. Let me hear from you.
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