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When I was in tenth grade English, I read about Einstein's concept of Cosmic Religious Feeling. The idea interested me because I believed I had felt what he was talking about, at a girl scout retreat where an early morning non-denominational service was held for us. I don't remember anything that was said then, but I remember where we were--an amphitheater with wooden benches, built into the side of a hill in the middle of the woods. I watched the light falling, lilting through the birch leaves, breathed in cold air like biting an apple. I felt at once, perfectly healthy in a vital, animal sense, and un-alone. Not in the sense of being surrounded by other girl scouts, but in the sense of being connected to something greater than myself, and to the rest of the world. I have read writers describing writing as a religious act, and I believe it is so, because I often get that same Einsteinian feeling of connection when writing. I don't believe that writing is a religious act that requires ultimate belief in a deity or any strict form of religion, although I feel my own faith deepened and reinforced by what I experience when writing: a feeling of living absolutely in the present, without past or future informing my thoughts. The words flow, and oftentimes, when I look at them later, I have absolutely no idea where they came from. They were not the product of my consious mind, unpremeditated. Sometimes writing doesn't bring this feeling, of course. There are times when writing feels, pat, stale, unintelligent. I work through that. Sometimes there are long breaks. But I keep writing, and I think that any writer, no matter how discouraged, has a duty to come back to writing. If you think of yourself in any way as a writer, or an artist, or a sculptor, or an architect, or even an accountant, you have a duty to use whatever competence or talent or intelligence you possess to put good, useful, human things in a world which constantly is having good, useful, human things removed from it. Even if you are the only one who sees your work, if it fulfills you, it goes some way to putting another happy, kind human being in the world, and in that way works progress for the rest of us. Service to humanity in any respect fulfills the highest goals of any doctrine, from secular humanism right up to organized faiths and creeds. Writing is a religious act. Extra Credit! Milton: On His Blindness | Watch Andrei Rublev. posted by Reen at 6:57 AM | link| versify 0 comments
One of the hardest things to write, at least for me, is the ending of a poem. I've found that I'm helped through this by studying the endings of poems like you might study any other poetic or literary device. Pick a poet, go to the library and get a "collected works" or some similar compilation, and locate three or four poems that end in different ways. Then analyze the ways they end--the formal elements of ending the poem. Do the final lines really substantively resolve the poem, or do they just sound final? You may find poems with really ambiguous endings that, nevertheless, through use of short declarative sentences, sound very final (this is a favorite gambit of John Ashbery). Or you may find the opposite: a quite substantively resolved poem that trails off in an ellipsis, making it sound ambigious (you can see this in some of the works of Theodore Roethke and Jorie Graham). posted by Reen at 7:41 AM | link| versify 0 comments
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