Wednesday Writing Assigment
I'm done with the cleanse, and the whole universe of eating is again, so to speak, my oyster. But I don't want it. I had millet for breakfast anyway. What the hell is wrong with me?
Tell me about a time you obtained something you thought you really wanted, but then...didn't want, after all.
posted by kStyle @ 11:38 AM
5 Comments:
weight lifting totally counts
When I was a kid, I wanted a puppy more than anything. My parents weren't pet-people and tried to dissuade me, but I made quite a pest of myself and eventually got the puppy. I named him Barker.
But it turned out that my parents weren't kidding about my having to be the one who fed him and walked him and cleaned up after him, and Barker wasn't very interesting, either. He yapped and played around, but he wouldn't learn any tricks and he slept too much.
So after about a month and a half, I put him outside and let him run away. I feel kind of bad about that now, but really, he was a very dull puppy.
Eric: now I don't know whether you're kidding.
Ann, that's amazing. I mean, I remember your notebooks full of stories from middle and high school, so I realize how far back it's gone. Congratulations on the new freedom.
And you know, maybe you'll enjoy writing more if it's not a "have to".
Never fear: I rarely question anyone's desire to stop writing poetry, particularly as I've been wrestling with a particularly thorny one of mine the last few weeks, and would throw in the towel myself if I didn't get such a peculiar satisfaction from finally getting it right.
No, basically I agree that life is short and we must do what pleases us, and try to avoid pursuits that come to be onorous chores. Also that, to the extent that poetry or any artistic craft is just that, a craft, a thing that must be practiced and honed and worked at like carpentry, the value in it for the doer must come from the doing--though often I think there is a sort of nobility in the work itself, the toil. But once the labor becomes, well, laborious, there isn't much there, it's true. Very little reason to keep struggling.
Now, I do believe that poetry, along with a few other things, is the stuff of the gods, that its odd paradox is its being manual labor on one hand and (possibly as a result) spiritual on the other. For me, this makes the work easier, or at least more worthwhile when it isn't any easier at all. (That goes for reading it as well as writing it.) But as someone who has never tried to make a living at writing, preferring instead to earn my wage helping others do that, I can attest that almost no one ever makes a living at writing. And no one, period, makes a living writing poetry.
But I didn't get the sense that you were giving it up for good, Ann--just that you had decided not to keep pursuing it as a career. It seems likely to me that after a (much-needed?) break from it all for a while, you'll return to it for pleasure and rediscover something. Either way, as the poet wrote: you gotta do what you gotta do.
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