Poem: It Was A Kindness
It Was A Kindness
but so long unfinished,
it has turned
into harm,
but there is no way
it will be completed:
it cannot be
as none remain
who know and know how.
Would it be better
if it had remained
untouched? Who knows.
A Writer's Notebook, Day Three-Hundred-And-Sixty-Five
One of my teachers, the late poet Thomas Lux, was fond of pointing out that writing and publishing are two different things. He stressed the need for a writer to focus on the work itself, not on the building of a career or the accumulation of publishing credits and other accolades. Those things are not what a writer should be working towards, he would say, but instead the focus needs to be upon the craft. He once expressed to me his belief that great work will always find a way into the world, even if it is after the artist has died. Emily Dickinson is, of course, a prime example of this, though far from the only one. That is a fine way to think about these things, but, and Lux also acknowledged this, to have a career as a writer requires doing all that other work. I tend to think that the writing itself is an important act on its own, having nothing to do with whether the work finds an audience immediately or not, and the publishing aspect as more of an ...
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