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moonwiseTaken from Stephen King's On Writing, totally without permission.
On Good Writing and Bad
I don't want to speak too disparagingly of my generation (actually I do; we had a chance to change the world and opted for the Home Shopping Network instead), but there was a view among the student writers I knew at the time that good writing came spontaneously, in an uprush of feeling that had to be caught at once; when you were building that all-important stairway to heaven, you couldn't be caught standing around with your hammer in your hand. Ars poetica in 1969 was perhaps best expressed by a Donovan Leitch song that went, "First there is a mountain / Then there is no mountain / Then there is." Would-be poets were living in a dewy, Tolkien-tinged world, catching poems out of the ether. It was pretty much unanimous: serious art came from... out there! Writers were blessed stenographers taking divine dictation. I don't want to embarrass any of my old mates from the period, so here is a fictionalized version of what I'm talking about, created from bits of many actual poems:
i close my eyes
in th dark i see
Rodan Rimbaud
in th dark
i swallow th cloth
of loneliness
crow i am here
raven i am here
If you were to ask the poet what this poem meant, you were likely to get a look of contempt. A slightly uncomfortable silence was apt to emanate from the rest. Certainly the fact that the poet would likely have been unable to tell you anything about the mechanics of creation would not have been considered important. If pressed, he or she might have said that there are no mechanics, only that seminal spurt of feeling: first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is. And if the resulting poem is sloppy, based on the assumption that words like "loneliness" mean the same thing to all of us - hey man, so what, just let go of that outdated bullshit and dig the heaviness.
On Good Writing and Bad
I don't want to speak too disparagingly of my generation (actually I do; we had a chance to change the world and opted for the Home Shopping Network instead), but there was a view among the student writers I knew at the time that good writing came spontaneously, in an uprush of feeling that had to be caught at once; when you were building that all-important stairway to heaven, you couldn't be caught standing around with your hammer in your hand. Ars poetica in 1969 was perhaps best expressed by a Donovan Leitch song that went, "First there is a mountain / Then there is no mountain / Then there is." Would-be poets were living in a dewy, Tolkien-tinged world, catching poems out of the ether. It was pretty much unanimous: serious art came from... out there! Writers were blessed stenographers taking divine dictation. I don't want to embarrass any of my old mates from the period, so here is a fictionalized version of what I'm talking about, created from bits of many actual poems:
i close my eyes
in th dark i see
Rodan Rimbaud
in th dark
i swallow th cloth
of loneliness
crow i am here
raven i am here
If you were to ask the poet what this poem meant, you were likely to get a look of contempt. A slightly uncomfortable silence was apt to emanate from the rest. Certainly the fact that the poet would likely have been unable to tell you anything about the mechanics of creation would not have been considered important. If pressed, he or she might have said that there are no mechanics, only that seminal spurt of feeling: first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is. And if the resulting poem is sloppy, based on the assumption that words like "loneliness" mean the same thing to all of us - hey man, so what, just let go of that outdated bullshit and dig the heaviness.
