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In Creative Writing graduate school in the US, reading of the scandalous, chaotic and pain-filled private lives of the American poets whose luminous poetry I loved, I naively asked the professor if he thought one needed to be a good man or woman to be a good poet.
(We were studying the “prophetic” voice in poetry, and whether it can be mimicked or simulated. Whether you can sound like a “prophet” without being one. And, yes, it can, and knowing how easily passionate rhetoric can be produced without passion but with a few verbal and rhetorical tricks in your bag, makes me listen to preachers and prophets and some bloggers with slightly narrowed eyes, and a degree of scepticism).
“Hell, no!” he said. “Most of these poets are regular SOBs.”
I no longer wonder if one needs to be a good person to be a good writer. I can echo the professor. “Hell, no!”
But it’s not worth it! Not being a good person is not worth it. Sacrificing goodness for the sake of art is not worth it.
Being a good person when no one is watching (which is one definition of character) is worth it in the long run. And in, most cases, leads to more productivity in the long run.
And it is certainly conducive to that gentle state we scorn in youth, value more in middle age, and which is invaluable in old age: happiness.
More from my site
Brexit and Deep Peace in Turbulent Times
On Breaking the 22 Minute Mile, and Stumbling on Happiness
We Have Something to Learn, and Something to Teach at Every Stage of Life
Poetry: A Love Affair
Invaluable Advice on Creativity for Bloggers and Poets from the Poet, William Stafford
On Choosing Happiness Today
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I too will start a blog with Gods help. I have been blocked my entire christian life by
people in authority over me. Somehow they feel threatened by me and start
doing things to sabatage me. One in particular is still doing it….even though we
worked together 10 years ago, we ended up attending the same bible study. I have
realized that she has been talking negatively about my years at the center we worked
at together all those years ago, to the ladies that attend the current bible study.
While she puts me down, she glorifies herself, referring to herself as the “sweet agreeable
one” while making me out to be the bad guy. Actually, the opposite was true. I don’t
think I was the good guy, but she was the one that everyone had to walk around on eggshells
She was a tyrant to fellow workers, but as sweet as pie to the “customers”. It was all
about making herself look good to them and on paper. She was dismissed after leading only
three or four years when she was always telling everyone she met that she was sure she would
be there for a long time. The reason for the dismissal was not one that I have ever shared with
others, even my own husband to protect her reputation. But all these years later, I find she has
been sharing things with others about me, some real and some imagined. Yet to my face she is “sweet as pie”.
As christians we must be aware of “frenemies” that pretend to be real and yet are not true friends.
I have started praying even more that God will lead me to true friends and make me a true friend in return.
It’s a sorry state of affairs when all of this is going on in christian relationships. If we would all be honest
with each other and stop all the nonsense we would advance the Kingdom of God rapidly and many would
be saved.
Thank you for encouraging me as well as others that are called to start a blog. This is an idea God gave me
and I intend to use it to glorify HIM. May you and your family be blessed forever!!!
Blessings on your blog, Linda!
It is as if some poets have a twisted self-esteem and can really only write for themselves. The only way they can assuage the pain of the clanking chains is to pour out words on the page and if the passion is real, it somehow lubricates the poetic soul. Or, something like that.
“They were silly like us,/Their gift survived it all,” as Auden wrote of Yeats!