A Thought on Writing and Reading

Writing and reading are a sojourn into the unknown and unexplored, that emits pleasure and surprise and satisifaction. It changes you: it imprints upon one's self a new sense of being, a sense that something is different about yourself, because you have written or read something that took you somewhere new. You cannot plan this. You cannot expect it or anticipate it or know what the final destination will be. Once the writing or reading has begun, It takes you and doesn't let you go until It decides to.

Or, at least that's what writing and reading should be. Anything that's written or read that's worthwhile is.

As my poetry professor, Dr. Forhan, said about poetry: "In my experience, one sure way to strangle a poem in the cradle is to decide too early what it's about - what idea it is expressing. One needs to repress the temptation to make a grand statement and instead let the words come... one needs to let the poem decide what it is going to be about. (I've learned that the poem is invariably smarter than I am.)"

In being swept up by the language itself, so many times the words have taken me places I didn't imagine beforehand. I inevitably learn something whenever I write or read. It may be a realization about myself or it could be about the world itself. Writing and reading also is a process of discovery, of having an experience or feeling or being in a place that may be familiar, but which is also different from anything before or will come after.

This is how William Stafford puts it: "A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them."

When this process is over, I think it sticks with you. You are new person, whether you know so.

An example that I hope illustrates these thoughts is one of my favorite poems, by James Wright called "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota."

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

The speaker comes to the epiphany, in the midst of these serene and unfiltered observations of nature, while lying in a hammock, that his is a life wasted. This is a surprise, both for the speaker and as a reader. Did you expect such a last line? We are taken somewhere new here, a realization is made, and that is what language, writing and reading, does and should do.