Must you Write?
If someone told me a few years ago that I’d write poetry frequently I might add I would have looked at them as if they were crazy. I’d probably call them crazy. Because the rhythm, the meter, the counting…oh the counting I couldn’t stand it.
But one day, I was trying to express something a paragraph couldn’t, that my prose couldn’t articulate, and so I turned to my last resort. Trust me, I searched the barrel before picking poetry off the bottom. But that aside I’ve been doing what I always do: research. So I’ve been reading more poetry: Dickinson, Wittman, Keats, etc., and I’ve picked up books about poetry itself, and I think it has a lot to say about writing in general. I’m currently halfway done with ‘Letters to a young poet’, written by Rainer Maria Rilke, and it asked me a pretty straightforward question I’d thought I’d pose to you.
The collection is the letters that the poet wrote to Franz Kappus in response to his letter asking to look over his poetry. I can’t imagine having the courage to send one of my manuscripts to a famous author, but he is just like us, the way he writes you can hear his fear and search for advice very clearly. Rilke responds to the young man by saying: “You ask in the letter if your poetry is good. You ask me[…] here is what I want you to do. Stop all that. You are looking outward, and that, more than anything, is what you should not be doing. The only thing…
