Is writing a kind of illness?
I wonder what makes me think of this subject today?
It's a cliché of literary history that writers, poets often enough, are head cases, mentally or emotionally unstable individuals who turn to writing perhaps to expel their demons, or, perhaps more truthfully, to engage them.
When you think about it, writing poetry--I mean seriously--is kind of a sick thing to do. There's no money in it. Nobody reads it, except others who do the same sick thing.
A friend and poet once observed that poems can't be fun or funny, that even a frivolous line of it conceals some pain, some personal disaster.
Hmm.
Sylvia Plath. Anne Sexton. Robert Lowell. John Berryman. Deborah Digges. Weldon Kees. Hart Crane.
What makes a person withdraw into verse rather than explode into it? Poetry and the Dark Night of the Soul!
Sicko poets.
Just kidding. I think.
I wonder what makes me think of this subject today?
It's a cliché of literary history that writers, poets often enough, are head cases, mentally or emotionally unstable individuals who turn to writing perhaps to expel their demons, or, perhaps more truthfully, to engage them.
When you think about it, writing poetry--I mean seriously--is kind of a sick thing to do. There's no money in it. Nobody reads it, except others who do the same sick thing.
A friend and poet once observed that poems can't be fun or funny, that even a frivolous line of it conceals some pain, some personal disaster.
Hmm.
Sylvia Plath. Anne Sexton. Robert Lowell. John Berryman. Deborah Digges. Weldon Kees. Hart Crane.
What makes a person withdraw into verse rather than explode into it? Poetry and the Dark Night of the Soul!
Sicko poets.
Just kidding. I think.
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