Lots of folks have told me that writers never retire, and there's a sense in which that is true. At the same time, I agree with the Zen notion that poetry is not the words on paper but the mode of activity in the mind of the poet. The thinking can remain without actually writing anything down'
I get into this in my essay "Creativity. Faith. Impotence" (in my archive, book). Some of the street people you hear talking to themselves are actually poets in this stage. Art moves in the direction of Silence. "Doing nothing, if properly understood, is the supreme action."
Writing down accomplishes two things: easier to manage complex material; easier to share with audience. Again, as I argue in my essay, the latter can become irrelevant to an inside-out writer. But the former remains true: some things are too layered to compose in your head alone.
I thought I was done writing. This was fine. My literary archive us huge. My ego is healthy: I think I have written plays, screenplays, stories, novels and poems that will stand the test of time. I don't need fame and fortune now because I had a good taste of it in the 1970s and 1980s. It ain't what it is cracked up to be. The only thing I miss is the money. When Yeats was told he'd won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first thing he said was, How much? He was right on.
So I thought I was done writing things down. Retirement would be reading, meditating and spending time with Harriet and Sketch.
I totally forgot the gods have a dark sense of humor.
I have something in my head that is begging to be written down. A story, maybe short, maybe a novella, a dark comedy, about an old fart whose wife has a heart attack ...
I get into this in my essay "Creativity. Faith. Impotence" (in my archive, book). Some of the street people you hear talking to themselves are actually poets in this stage. Art moves in the direction of Silence. "Doing nothing, if properly understood, is the supreme action."
Writing down accomplishes two things: easier to manage complex material; easier to share with audience. Again, as I argue in my essay, the latter can become irrelevant to an inside-out writer. But the former remains true: some things are too layered to compose in your head alone.
I thought I was done writing. This was fine. My literary archive us huge. My ego is healthy: I think I have written plays, screenplays, stories, novels and poems that will stand the test of time. I don't need fame and fortune now because I had a good taste of it in the 1970s and 1980s. It ain't what it is cracked up to be. The only thing I miss is the money. When Yeats was told he'd won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first thing he said was, How much? He was right on.
So I thought I was done writing things down. Retirement would be reading, meditating and spending time with Harriet and Sketch.
I totally forgot the gods have a dark sense of humor.
I have something in my head that is begging to be written down. A story, maybe short, maybe a novella, a dark comedy, about an old fart whose wife has a heart attack ...
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