The great Czeslaw Milosz. My tastes have quickly run away from Anglo/American writers to those of Europe; will they fly next to Africa? Asia? Is poetry really the essence of what is lost in translation? Then why the vast popularity of translated poetry? Why does Shakespeare remain dominant even in translation? The desire to read in the original languages runs very deep indeed. German. Spanish. Danish. Russian. And so on. But recently I find it difficult to keep attention to reading poetry, or writing it for that matter. My attention span: is it diminishing with age? At 24 am I already on the decline mentally. Perhaps. Nonfiction catches my eye as I age. Say mature instead. I sometimes mock (mildly I hope) my wife for reading light romances when she should/could/should read “greater things.” Who am I to judge or make divisions?
Enough. A commitment to reading well and reading often. Writing will come when I cease to distract myself and immerse myself in the stories of the past. The greats that inspire. I can never help but long to write after reading Kierkegaard or Salinger. Does Kafka inspire me less? If only because he steamrolls over any pretensions I might have–then again, he may be a better model of nonproduction or incomplete production. Better to be Kierkegaard, voluminous in his published writings as in his thoughts. Or Salinger, who wrote much, published little of it but enough.
Enough. What is enough? Rilke says that you should not write if you can imagine doing anything else. What if I cannot imagine doing anything else but still maintain difficulty
in the vision of myself as a poet? So much crappy poetry being published today. Is mine along with it? I don’t revise enough that’s true. I don’t polish as I should. I burst with ideas and grand dreams but seldom manage to carry it through to completion. “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan…” Good old Coleridge. I suppose that’s one strategy, to reduce one’s inhibitions artificially until you can’t stop writing unless the dream is broken by that desperate interruption.
A commitment to writing then, one that must not be broken. Even freewriting is therapeutic and inspirational. From this very mess of thoughts poured onto to the virtual page, electronic page, communally glorious page, what riches can be harvested? The harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few.