Post by RonPrice on Feb 11, 2005 20:48:36 GMT -5
MY DAYS
The craft of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness. In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.....A good writer always works at the impossible...straining and puffing....This urge dies hard....one must withdraw for a time from life in order to set down the picture....it's a real horse's ass business....the writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true...he thinks he must be crazy because he is so alone....It is the duty of the writer to lift up, to extend, to encourage. -John Steinbeck in Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews: Fourth Series, editor, George Plimpton, Viking Press, NY, 1976, pp.194-196.
John, I find there is not much straining
and puffing in this writing, but some
accumulating residue of fatigue that comes
as much from living as from writing,
from the simple daily round, repeated
it seems infinitely, the struggle of our days,
the need for patience, the inability to satisfy
the passions, the regular tiredness of late evening,
the exhaustion of early morning and when I finish
some poem, I'm happy to embalm it in its file forever
and go on to some new inspiration, curiosity, joy and
an inevitable weariness. There is a peace, a quiet, in
the moving from poem to poem with their strange and
secret things, their mystic edges and mysterious centres.
There is darkness, too; the force of trying takes some of
life's juices from me and the darkness gets darker, but
there is light and I am not afraid of finishing. In some waysI will bequeath it all, from my aloneness, and it will drift away to and through the minds of others. My poetry will get on a Grayhound bus and travel through the night to unknown destinations, see the sun rise and the blue sky and cover forever all that I have tried to say in my days.
Ron Price
16 March 1996
The craft of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness. In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.....A good writer always works at the impossible...straining and puffing....This urge dies hard....one must withdraw for a time from life in order to set down the picture....it's a real horse's ass business....the writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true...he thinks he must be crazy because he is so alone....It is the duty of the writer to lift up, to extend, to encourage. -John Steinbeck in Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews: Fourth Series, editor, George Plimpton, Viking Press, NY, 1976, pp.194-196.
John, I find there is not much straining
and puffing in this writing, but some
accumulating residue of fatigue that comes
as much from living as from writing,
from the simple daily round, repeated
it seems infinitely, the struggle of our days,
the need for patience, the inability to satisfy
the passions, the regular tiredness of late evening,
the exhaustion of early morning and when I finish
some poem, I'm happy to embalm it in its file forever
and go on to some new inspiration, curiosity, joy and
an inevitable weariness. There is a peace, a quiet, in
the moving from poem to poem with their strange and
secret things, their mystic edges and mysterious centres.
There is darkness, too; the force of trying takes some of
life's juices from me and the darkness gets darker, but
there is light and I am not afraid of finishing. In some waysI will bequeath it all, from my aloneness, and it will drift away to and through the minds of others. My poetry will get on a Grayhound bus and travel through the night to unknown destinations, see the sun rise and the blue sky and cover forever all that I have tried to say in my days.
Ron Price
16 March 1996