February 5th, 2025
Sometimes, not enough is too much.
Hera Lindsay Bird identifies the root of the problem: “People don’t want to hear poetry, they want to hear people talk about poetry.” The literature is no longer the thing, but instead it is the subject; it is no longer a “meadow in which to burn yourself alive,” but a process—a practice in forensics. The whole enterprise becomes an effort to strip the canon of its natural tautologies and replace them with a system. The writer, whether she is the dead precursor or the living ephebe, is consequently frozen out of the realization of the act of writing. She is no longer permitted to define her own ontology; oftentimes she doesn’t even know that she’s allowed to. Sam Kriss says a better literature “would take a genuine interest in other people, other eras and other ways of being.” But even this goes too far; it is too prescriptive—a recipe for indigestion. It is not enough to declare the difficulty of saying what writing ought to do; we must recognize that the attempt should not be made in the first place. For the reader, to do so is perhaps a venial sin, but for the writer, uttering a prescription is fatal. The writer must never write for other writers as readers, for writers are the most dishonest of all readers.
When writers write for other writers—not as readers but as writers—it’s a love letter, and so it is honest. But we must also remember that in the love letter, the word ‘love’ is used in the loosest sense; if the term ‘infatuation’ were wieldier there would be no love letters. Love, it can be said, is a quiet embrace of that which is; but to be infatuated is to crave that which is desired. This is doubly true for the strong writer—for to be a strong writer is to be shamelessly autoerotic. Kriss rightly observes that inspired writing expands “into the large and sensuous world,” with all its contradictions and ironies. His only error is to misunderstand the scope of the possible, to assume the writer must reach into some “outside,” lest she be incurious. Truly, there are no confines to be exceeded, nor is there a ‘now’ to be addressed or a self to be assessed. The strong writer has nothing to be curious about except her impulse to write; that is to say, her Muse. Her inner and her outer worlds will inevitably be consumed by the same unsounding deep.