[New-Poetry] so you want to be a writer? by Charles Bukowski

[Anny Ballardini]

a more sensitive outlook on the topic.
  From: David Graham 
  Sent: Monday, May 14, 2007 10:48 PM


  It's a pretty lame poem, I'd agree, but not for the reason stated.  Nothing wrong with repetition, I'd say.   After all, Beethoven's Fifth is mostly repetition, and so is Song of Myself . . . .  


  Anyway, here's W. S. Merwin on the same theme, done a bit better, in my opinion.  Perhaps because he's channeling Berryman. . . .


  Berryman

  I will tell you what he told me
  in the years just after the war
  as we then called
  the second world war

  don't lose your arrogance yet he said
  you can do that when you're older
  lose it too soon and you may
  merely replace it with vanity

  just one time he suggested
  changing the usual order
  of the same words in a line of verse
  why point out a thing twice

  he suggested I pray to the Muse
  get down on my knees and pray
  right there in the corner and he
  said he meant it literally

  it was in the days before the beard
  and the drink but he was deep
  in tides of his own through which he sailed
  chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop

  he was far older than the dates allowed for
  much older than I was he was in his thirties
  he snapped down his nose with an accent
  I think he had affected in England

  as for publishing he advised me
  to paper my wall with rejection slips
  his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
  with the vehemence of his views about poetry

  he said the great presence
  that permitted everything and transmuted it
  in poetry was passion
  passion was genius and he praised movement and invention

  I had hardly begun to read
  I asked how can you ever be sure
  that what you write is really
  any good at all and he said you can't

  you can't you can never be sure
  you die without knowing
  whether anything you wrote was any good
  if you have to be sure don't write

  -- W.S. Merwin.  *Flower & Hand*. Copper Canyon Press.












  ========================================
  David Graham
  grahamd at ripon.edu
  Home Page:
  http://www.ripon.edu/academics/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
  Poetry Library:
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  ==========================================

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