PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

As human beings living in a world that we ourselves have broken (you know, those two naked knuckleheads in a garden, plucking fruit when they had been told specifically not to do so), we proceed by paradox so very often.  And this poem presents a paradox from which you should take encouragement:  that you have this fear, and that you wonder about whether your poetry is worth sharing is proof---let me say again, IT IS PROOF---that you are a real Poet.  At the end of his life, John Milton was not at all confident about Samson Agonistes.  T. S. Eliot allowed Pound to ravage The Waste Land (in its original form, which I believe to be the superior version).  The poor response to Wallace Stevens' first book of poems, in 1923, caused him to doubt his poetic abilities so that he fell silent for seven years.  And, to me this is the most dramatic example . . . Vergil, on his deathbed, wanted to burn the manuscript of The Aeneid; because the fever had so weakened him, he could not stand up, so his caregivers simply moved the manuscript box out of his reach such that he could not damage it.  He revised his will ordering his executors to destroy the poem, but the emperor, Augustus, set aside this provision. and the epic was published with even the errors still present, as Augustus would not allow even the obviously needed editing to be done.  Only the wannabes do not have these doubts:  they post their vertical proses and poses, or their end-stopped lines with inaccurate rhymes, and write about events from the news cycle, or Aunt Maisie's collection of kinfolk photographs, or that day Cousin Crawfish bought those nail clippers from the five and dime.  And the poseurs who write like this never,  ever, question it; never doubt its worth or appropriateness; never concede that they are second rate.

   Let me close wth this.  After Lord Byron proposed his famous ghost story contest, in June 1816 in Geneva, Switzerland, only two of the five people at the party followed through:  Mary Shelley, and John Polidori.  Polidori's novel, The Vampyre, was cobbled together and sent to the printer with little, if any, editorial effort; they tell me.  But if you look at Mary's manuscript, you see how very "worked over" it is, how much revision it went through, going through two years of the writing and revision process.  Published in 1818, it went through another revision process in 1831, as she was still not entirely sure about it.  And whose novel do we still read today?

   The self-doubt expressed in this poem is both normal and healthy, but you should not allow it to silence you.  I suggest that you take some encouragement from a reading of Wallace Stevens' late poem, "The Planet On The Table" in which he described writing poetry for the sheer joy of it, and how to perceive the value in whiatever subject matter happens to fill the lines of your poetry. You are a good Poet, and your Poetry is worth sharing, and we who read your Poems very much appreciate them.