The weeping willow has taken to screaming

[sovay]

An unexpected by-product of becoming an editor: a greater than usual disgust with my own work, because there is so much more bad writing of one kind or another in the world than I had even previously believed; I don't even have (even if I wanted) the latitude to be mediocre. And all the things I want most to write I don't think I have the intelligence to. I'm only high-concept when I dream. I go through this periodically, this burning despite for everything I write or think. I don't know if I come out of it a better writer or just lapse back into a kind of frustrated written-off complacency. I wrote poems last year I like better than poems from 2009. (I wrote some poems in 2009 I still don't hate.) I still can't know if that makes them good.

I didn't use to think I was ambitious. I just liked not to do things badly. I hate to be limited. Same old, same old. I saw Amadeus at the Old Vic when I was seventeen.

Anyway, on the brighter side, because there is also good writing in the world: Robin Robertson, "At Roane Head." Fucking best selkie poem I can remember reading. I'd buy the book for it. And someone is repainting Eurydike on the underground.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

To me it seems strange that seeing so much poor stuff should make you disgusted with your own stuff, which is so obviously not-that. I would have expected that it would have the opposite effect and make you think, "Well, however my stuff fails to satisfy me, at least it's not as bad as X." But maybe with your own stuff you lack perspective and are afraid it **is** as bad as X?

And my poor, limited brain just boggles at the thought that you find yourself not intelligent enough to write the things you want to write. It makes me think there must be whole vistas that you can see that I can't possibly imagine. But all right; I can accept that's true.

I can sort of understand something of your feeling, maybe, if I imagine that you want to go places with your poetry that you haven't been to yet. I can imagine, just about, being dissatisfied with the sorts of poems that you're very good at (which still give people like me pleasure, that's for sure) and wanting to do something different, wanting to visit different places....

There are other thoughts brewing in the back of my head, but I've already spent a lot of words to say not much, so I'll let it go. If they ever approach some level of persuasive articulateness, I'll write them down. Or maybe even if they do, I'll spare you. (In any case, they're not approaching articulateness right now, so for right now you're most definitely spared.)