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

[tithenai.livejournal.com]

Oh, I adore Robin Robertson. I was introduced to his writing by hearing him read it in Ottawa, in an underground pub a few doors down from the bookstore at which I worked. Thank you for sharing that!

Now, as for you.

It makes me helplessly furious when writers whose work I love beyond all reckoning say they are disgusted with it. Furious, because how dare they, that work invents new colours of wonderful; helpless, because I know what it is to feel that it isn't enough in my own work, and that no amount of my telling them otherwise will sway their opinion, because the gulf between what they want and what they do will always only be perceptible to their own inward gazes, and has nothing to do with me.

Still.

I'm only high-concept when I dream

is a poem in itself. Further, I reject the logic of your first sentence. So there.