Nobody wanted your dance, Nobody wanted your strange glitter, your floundering Drowning life and your effort to save yourself, Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil, Looking for something to give.
Whatβs writing really about? Itβs about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.
He could not stand. It was not That he could not thrive, he was born With everything but the will β That can be deformed, just like a limb. Death was more interesting to him. Life could not get his attention.
Imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic.
I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.
The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain β and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.
