But still alcohol is better for sitting around moping and writing than ecstasy I think. Never heard of anyone claiming the latter as part of their creative process - musicians yeah, not writers - although I'm sure there is someone.
Maybe Tao Lin.
But still alcohol is better for sitting around moping and writing than ecstasy I think. Never heard of anyone claiming the latter as part of their creative process - musicians yeah, not writers - although I'm sure there is someone.
I think what shiels was saying about trauma is part of this. Each work representing a breaking down and reconfiguring of the self
Gardeners often seem very contented. I know a few people who work at places like Kew and they have this beatific calm about them. It's kinda beguiling. They also seem creative in a very real way- creating new life, new places.
So I wouldn't say they're boring but they can be so contented it's otherworldly and a bit disconcerting
The opposite of boring
Frank O'Hara. He had a blast.
@craner it's true though
Who could have foreseen the militantly anti-gardener turn this thread has taken?
If you expand your range beyond the experience of friends and family and the joys of nature, happiness is a very fragile idea. Because the world is so full of misery—so full of disaster and destruction, and violence, and vituperative vindictiveness, of political exploitation, of financial insecurity, of the breakdown of trust, and the whole international crisis world of terror and struggles for justice, that it’s not easy to see how a poet can claim any right to be happy, while all this is going on. To be a poet, and to be there in the thick of an important and powerful language, is to be in direct potential communication with every part of the world’s action, including, without doubt, all its misery.
It’s difficult not to be overwhelmed by the sense that language joins you up to the powers of lamentation. At the same time, that’s where the dialectical aspect frequently has its task to perform. Contradiction and oppositional thinking, ironical thinking, has to find a way to juggle up these terms, so that the mood quality, and the emotional, and moral tonalities involved, maintain their power without becoming oppressively single-minded. Single-mindedness is no good to a poet.
This is what the torture is about perhaps. The burden of opening your eyes to an absurd, incoherent reality end holding on to a sense of beauty in a world that can't live up to it.