It is the responsibility of the serious writer to remind the reader of their mortality. Whether that be through the visceral communication of the beauty and humour of humanity and creation, or the humility of impending tragedy, either work puts to good use the time of the writer and the reader.
i realized today, that the biggest struggle of an artist, next to doing the work, is the fight, not to become discouraged. a breeze can bring you down, but it takes a construction team of a hundred, and a bucket of your blood to build one sound story. – march 31, 2011
Writing fiction helped my poetry because writing is good for writing.
I don’t believe that poets have more feelings than people that are not artistically inclined. I think poets allow their feelings to live their lives more unencumbered than is common. That freedom overflows to the page.
I have given myself permission to experience my emotions as intense as they are, and to respond to that intensity without concern for the scrutiny of observers.
It is a self-sustaining system. You affirm your feelings and they intensify. Likewise, if you suppress your feeling, you will know them less and less until you will not be able to say or write about them with accuarcy.
I was once in a theatre full of people, at a concert, where I was the only one dancing. I don’t think that happened because I am irrepressible and the only one present that experienced the music as moving. I was just willing to be publicly devastated by it.
The artist’s experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its pleasure, that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same longing and bliss.
I know if I am not feeling that level of intensity when I am writing (with what I am writing) that I am just phoning it in. When I do work that I feel has some courage and life and fire in it, I feel the same level of vulnerability writing that I feel as when I am making love.
oceans and fire 